Re: Bookworms: what are you reading/listening to now?
If you like that sort of stuff, you might want to look into either "Superbolan" or "Stonyman Farm." They are pretty run of the mill but are entertaining if you like spy/black ops stuff. Superbolan is basically a super-spy that acts on his own on solo missions given by Stonyman (a farm that's really a Secret US spy base) where Stonyman is stories about tactical teams sent out from there.
There's a lot of war on Terror ideology in there and if you don't like that, it might be a snag. But on the plus side, the author doesn't engage in a lot of racial stereotyping, frequently putting people of ethnic minorities or foreign countries outside of Europe in positive heroic roles. Often his villains are white upper-class rich Americans, or if they are foreign such as being Middle-Eastern, he makes sure to point out through the narrative that they are exceptions to the rule. I'd say more often than not with named characters, Middle Eastern characters are on the good side.
If you want something funnier along those lines, go for "the Executioner." The books were mostly written in the 70s and 80s but the series was revived in the 2000s and I think might have either been revived again or simply kept going. The story is about Rimo Williams, a cop who is whisked away from a prison after a fake execution and recruited by the government to be trained by a North Korean assassin (who is obsessed with US soap operas.) to fight threats to the US. The stories are pretty farcical, with enemies including Soviet spies trying to recruit an army from a set of dim-witted UFo Enthusiasts, and other equally silly set-ups. It parodies things like the Rubix cube, conspiracy theories, telephone operators, and lots of other stuff that is profoundly 70s and 80s though a lot of it though I'm too young to have lived it still rings as funny. However, some of the humor is not exactly Politically correct, with a couple parodies of feminism and although Chiun (the North Korean Assassin) is a fully developed character with as complex and unique a personality as anyone in the series, it sometimes slips into ancient Asian master stereotyping. On the other hand, it parodies super-spy thrillers incredibly, with Remo often reaching feats of superhuman abilities that are so outlandish that they become funny from being so over-the-top. There is some B-movie version of the first book or at least the basic idea of the series called something like "Remo Williams: the adventure begins" (I know for certain "Remo Williams" is in the title.) but I haven't seen the film.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
