Book Club: On Her Majesty's Secret Service

From the back of the book: When Bond rescues a beautiful reckless girl from self-destruction, he finds himself with a leaed on one of the most dangerous men in the world - Enrst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. In the snow-bound fastness of his Alpine base, Blofeld is conducting research that could threaten the safety of the world. To thwart the evil genius, Bond must get himself and the vital information he has gathered out of the base and away from SPECTRE's agents. Which may require the help of someone who is both beautiful and a little reckless...

This is the first Bond book I've ever read and it couldn't feel more like a Bond book. That may sound odd but it really is like reading an action film. The style took me a while to get used to; I'm not used to reading ski-chases and gun fire! Saying that, once I got used to the style, I got really into it. Bond is famous for a reason - what a great character. He's a complete douchebag but you still root for him... how does that work!?

Anyway, this is Book No.3 of the Book Club, (chosen by Lulu!) so let me share some of the views we had: We were all pretty grateful that it was so easy to read; we got through it pretty quickly and it didn't go on too long. I did briefly bring up the 'sexist' topic that seems to come hand-in-hand with most Bond analysis because the girls really are just objects who are beautiful but weak and characterless. Saying that, we didn't expect much more than that from Bond and so it didn't seem to cause any problems!

We all agreed that after a bit of a slow start, things improved. There's a good villain, a fun setting in the snowy Alps, a definite creepy feel throughout the narrative and a great final twist.

At the end of our Book Club meetings we all rate the book out of 10 and average it out. With quite a range in popularity, Bond got a good 7/10.