Do you remember when I made goals to finish reading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and reread all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books? Well, I got through all of Bond in September and read my last unread Spenser novel earlier this week. What did I learn? My big takeaway from the Bond books is they were even more sexist and racist than I remember them, as much a product of Fleming’s as they were of the times. As for the Spenser books, Parker was certainly more willing to play around in his early books than later on. That said, I haven’t read most of those books in a good long while, so maybe I’ll make that a reading challenge someday. Of course, I already have plenty lined up for next year. I’ll get to that, and everything else I read this year, in another post.
