The Spy Who Loved Me
Vivienne Michel, a precocious French Canadian raised in the United Kingdom, seems a foreigner in every land. With only a supercharged Vespa and a handful of American dollars, she travels down winding roads into the pine forests of the Adirondacks. After stopping at the Dreamy Pines Motor Court and being coerced into caretaking at the vacant motel for the night, Viv opens the door to two armed mobsters and realizes being a woman alone is no easy task. But when a third stranger shows—a confident Englishman with a keen sense for sizing things up—the tables are turned. Still reeling in the wake of Operation Thunderball, Bond had planned for his jaunt through the Adirondacks to be a period of rest before his return to Europe. But that all changes when his tire goes flat in front of a certain motel…
Stats for nerds
0recommend
5mentions
5people
2010–2025years
60% neutral40% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I read 52 books this year:
- Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
- The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
- When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté
- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
- The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
- Standing Strong by John MacArthur
- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
- We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan B. Peterson
- I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek
- The Holy Bible
- Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef
- I Am Giorgia by Giorgia Meloni
- 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
- The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren
- The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray
- The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray
- The War on the West by Douglas Murray
- Porn Generation by Ben Shapiro
- The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen
- Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
- Moonraker by Ian Fleming
- Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming
- From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
- Dr No by Ian Fleming
- Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
- For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming
- Thunderball by Ian Fleming
- The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming
- You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming
- The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Next year I will read more books of the Russian writers on this list. I enjoyed those books very much.
After seeing this list, what books do you recommend for me?
- The one I remember best was "The Spy Who Loved Me", where the plot of the novel is about a woman in a cabin or something and the relation to the movie is... Zero.
But it wasn't the plots that I thought were worse, but the writing itself.
- Only the first, Casino Royale, is close to realistic.
Some of the short stories also seem realistic, as does The Spy Who Loved Me.
The later books seem more fanciful.
- "The Spy Who Loved Me" was the shortest of Fleming's works that I read. But given that, I agree with the author of the article that many of the Bond books had serious failings.
I read "Live and Let Die" and was embarrassed for Fleming for his attempt to channel Joel Chandler Harris. A case where the film bettered the book.
"Goldfinger" has the villain actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. Another case where it was better in the film.
"Diamonds Are Forever" and "Casino Royale" are the books I can say I liked the most.
- In terms of incentive to learn, we're talking about maybe $10 for a book. This is a relatively small amount of money for something which will likely keep the person entertained for several hours over a week or two. In addition most readers are educated, employed and earn above average which puts them in the class of people where time (to learn these things) is proportionally more important to them than money. You talk about giving people enough incentive but I really don't see that many people being strongly incentivised to learn by that sort of saving.
You're also making the assumption that book X has no substitute and that they must read this but this is rarely the case (and in those situations the item will actually almost always have a higher value to the individual increasing the price they're willing to pay).
If I look at the Spy Who Loved Me and I find that it's £5.25 on Amazon and I think that's not a good price, I could easily see that I could get Casino Royale for £4.35. If I think that's too expensive it would take me about 30 seconds to see that I could get The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for £2.68 or the Lost Symbol for £2.76.
Piracy is not just not the only alternative and indeed I'd suggest that in the vast majority of cases it's not the main alternative.
(If you think that £2.68 is too much for a novel then might I ask what the reasonable price is at which you'd buy rather than pirate? My guess would be that it's likely to be in the area where the publisher essentially doesn't see you as a potential customer anyway (at least not a profitable one) and broadly doesn't really care what you do).
Beyond this you assume that initial attempts at piracy will be positive where research shows that this isn't the case. If someone attempts to find a torrent and spends half an hour battering their head against password protected files, dead links and so on, they're just as easy to write the whole thing off. At that point buying behaviour is actually reenforced as they now longer see downloading as a viable option.
As for habits the use of the work "exhaustive" to relate to an Amazon search which might take 30 seconds is misleading. I agree that you're not going to search 50 sites to find the best price but a search on Amazon to get a ballpark figure isn't onerous at all. Where someone has made some sort of investment in a new behaviour pattern it might be true that it was more of a one way trip but in this case the barrier to returning to legitimate purchasing is so low as to not be there.
EDIT: I would accept that there are some instances where book piracy will be (and is) rife. Generally these would be where the price is higher (computer or academic books for example) increasing the incentive, and where the potential customer / pirate is more familiar with the technology and therefore the barriers to moving into piracy are lower but for mass market books I don't see it being an issue in the way you describe.
