More Bond

Back in March, I posted about a bunch basically random topics. One of the topics was about visiting the Reader's Corner, a local used book store, and picking up some books. As an aside, the Reader's Corner also sells books via an Amazon.com site and a site at Abebooks.com. Included in my purchases back in March were the first two books in the James Bond series. Today, I paid another visit to the shop and purchased the next five books in the series. The third book is Moonraker which became the eleventh of the Bond films in 1979. The movie starred Roger Moore instead of Sean Connery who starred in six of the first seven Bond films. Moore's first Bond movie was Live and Let Die which was released in 1973. It was the eighth film but was adapted from the second book. The fourth book in the Bond series is Diamonds Are Forever which became the seventh Bond film in 1971. That film was Connery's last time in the role of James Bond for the official series of films, although in 1983, he starred in Never Say Never Again which is not considered part of the official series.

Moving right along, I mentioned the fifth (From Russia with Love) and sixth (Doctor No) books in my previous post along with the fact that they became the second and first films. Those films were released in 1963 and 1962 respectively. The seventh book in the series is Goldfinger. The film version of that book was released in 1964 and was the third in the series. The movie version of Goldfinger is my personal favorite of the film series. There is the best of the Bond girls, although Entertainment Weekly disagrees. (Their number one isn't bad either.) The title character, Auric Goldfinger, is one of the best of the Bond villains. Of course, the word "auric" means relating to gold. There are also all the great quotes, and the first appearance of the most famous of Bond's cars, an Aston Martin DB5 which had been tweaked a bit by Q.

During my visit to the bookstore, I also bought three other books. Smart-Aleck Kill is a small collection of stories by Raymond Chandler. All four of the stories are also included in The Simple Art of Murder which I have previously read, but this will be a good excuse to read them again. The Turk is about a famous chess-playing machine from the 18th century, all of which can be deduced by the book's full long title. Finally, Zeno's Paradox is about a series of paradoxes postulated by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, the most famous of which concerns a race between the Greek hero Achilles and a tortoise.