The exotic and desirable avocado pear

At the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard on the charms of Ian Fleming's Bond books (I adored those books when I was younger, I have read the best of them again and again in my time--I must confess that my particular favorite was always the narratively anomalous The Spy Who Loved Me). My admiration for the Fleming mode definitely has something to do with my long-time failure to appreciate the novels of John LeCarre, who seems weighty and humorless in comparison--and yes, I know they are doing two totally different things, but really Fleming had the more striking imagination of the two and a far more pleasing literary mode also (LeCarre at his best is morally suggestive and thought-provoking but at his worst is just plain pretentious and awful).