Robert Rush

This was a book that wasn't as clever as it thought it was. I had the exact same complaints as with ‘Seveneves' - long, ponderous and dull with one dimensional characters. I kept wondering how many more pages left I had to power through. Stephenson is very popular and regarded as a sci-fi legend, so clearly I'm wrong. It just isn't for me.

Much like the author's ‘Ready Player One', this felt like a truck had dumped a huge load of 80s/90s pop culture straight into my mind. Barely a page passed without at least one geeky quip mentioned in dialogue or description.

It took several chapters for me to acclimatise to it and was all ready to rant – to pass it off as merely like a lazy 'Family Guy' episode, where flat characters, holes in the story and attempts at humour had been replaced by increasingly tiresome references. A glue to fill the gap where obvious influences ‘Ender's Game' and ‘The Last Starfighter' had been cut and shut together.

However, as the story continued along, I got into the groove and found myself enjoying it and quickly forgave its flaws. It's undoubtedly disposable but a perfect fun holiday read and there's nothing wrong with that. It will interesting to see where Cline goes from here and whether he will evolve his writing style to pastures new. I'll certainly be onboard to find out.

I'm a big Bond movie fan and much to my shame, I've never even cracked the spine of any of Fleming's original novels. I decided to rectify that and starting at the beginning seemed like a very good place to start.

The 2006 adaptation is one of my favourite Bond films and you can see from where the movie took many of its cues. However, the book was certainly ‘of its time' and a large amount of acceptance was required to put the often awkward racism, sexism, misogyny and older language use into a historical context. Poor old 1953 Vesper Lynd is certainly a long way from Eva Green's brilliant modern portrayal.

An interesting and enjoyable read, I'm definitely going to carry on with the other 007 books.