Bibliography - bumper edition

[the_lady_lily]

Right, this is going to be loooooong.

Comments

[poldyb]

These reviews, especially of Cassanova and Balzac are quite helpful!

[the_lady_lily]

Really? Gosh! Dare I ask why?

[poldyb]

Nothing fancy. I have simply now struck Balzac from my to read list and replaced it with Casanova.

[friend_of_tofu]

READ THIS

You will not regret it, now you have read 'Dracula' (of which even BSD is not that good an adaption really).

Also, Casanova ftw.

[the_lady_lily]

Hee!

[ashfae]

Have you seen the movie of Maltese Falcon? I'd love to know what you think of it now that you've read the book (which I haven't, but clearly should).

[the_lady_lily]

I actually have seen the film version; my review of it is here, although it is from 2006.

[ashfae]

I remember; I'd be interested to know how you think the two compare.

[the_lady_lily]

OK. Re-reading back over the review - I think the book really does a better job of communicating the deepness of the relationship that Spade and O'Shaughnessy manage to create in a short amount of time, so that her final appeal to it feels far more credible than I seem to have thought it did in the film

[alextiefling]

I didn't think The Dain Curse was as good as The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man, but The Silver Key was the weakest. Red Harvest is pretty enjoyable gangster stuff. As it was the inspiration for Yojimbo and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, expect plenty of shootings.

If your edition of Casanova is based on the 1902 translation, you may have missed one of the juicy details in the Constantinople sequence; was there a mention of the two-man expedition to spy on harem girls, and how the narrator satisfied his feelings?

[the_lady_lily]

Hmm, I think I will skip the other Hammett novels, then; I'm feeling a bit gangstered out, to tell you the truth.

There was indeed a mention of a two-man expedition to spy on the harem girls, but for the life of me I can't remember if there was a 'how the narrator satisfied his feelings' moment! I've been reading it in dribs and drabs rather than consistently, as it is such an episodic book that it's a pleasure to read it in that way, and my memory isn't recalling salaciousness as well as it might.

[alextiefling]

This may well have been one of the fine details that was omitted in the earlier translation; I recall from the bit that I read that he fulfilled the lusts that the unreachable harem girls provoked by turning to his companion, Ismail, for satisfaction. He's slightly elliptical about what exactly he did, but it's one of the more frankly homoerotic sequences.