Matitya Loran

This book was quite good. It’s not as sophisticated or cerebral as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by any stretch but it’s still a good book. The villainous Count Dracula is a character that I can quite easily despise despite his few physical appearances in the story. And I could hardly root for Jonathan Harker more in his efforts to eliminate this scourge from existence. Stoker does a great job of getting me to sympathize with everyone from the violent and deranged Renfield (it helps that Stoker actually knows what criminal insanity is) to Lucy and Mina. I also appreciate how Dr. Seward is (as far as I can tell) a competent psychiatrist (or at least better than most fictional therapists) and that the book doesn’t conflate psychiatrists with psychologists. My criticisms of this book would be that 1) Dr. Van Helsing (especially early in the book) seems to know everything the plot needs him to know though this flaw is corrected by the book’s end 2) There’s a scene (towards the end) where Jonathan starts speaking in broken English and using overly elaborate metaphors as if he were Van Helsing despite them being different characters though at least this is one off and 3) I’m not the biggest fan of epistolary fiction or alternating between first person narrators. When all is said and done, it’s pretty good.

Live and Let Die was a really good book. I liked it significantly better than the original book to which it was a sequel (Casino Royale) and I liked the first book. This book embraces the action and adventure aspects of the series in a way which the first instalment didn’t and I love that about it. It leaves me excited to read the next James Bond book. (This book does have a lot of unfortunate racial language but it’s good nonetheless.)

It was pretty good. I have yet to read the sequels (and haven’t seen the movies) so I won’t attempt to compare them. The parts of the book that are about Baccarat are fine but not really what I read spy novels for that said, the parts about espionage are quite good. When Le Chiffre begins to act like the villain of a spy novel (that’s not a spoiler, he’s established as a villain in the first chapter), he’s impressively menacing. There’s also a plot twist at the end which I foresaw but somehow still shocked me which I won’t give away. All in all, it’s a pretty good book.