Mostly been reading Alien/Predator stuff lately, but I've taken a break to read James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me by Christopher Wood.
This, despite being a novelisation of a film, has a reputation of being one of the best post-Fleming Bond novels, and so far I'd say it's living up to that reputation. Wood has somehow managed to take what is a ridiculously over-the-top movie (not intended as criticism) and dial it back so that the book reads more like a Fleming story. There are also a lot of callbacks to Fleming's continuity, like the return of SMERSH, who take over the role of the far more amicable Russians in the movie. Speaking of the more aggressive Russians, the book in general is a lot more violent than the film - in particular, the scene where Stromberg feeds his assistant to a shark for betraying him is incredibly gory, while there's also an added sequence where Bond is captured and tortured by having a battery hooked up to his genitals, which makes for grim reading.
I'm two-thirds of the way through it, but honestly this might be the best film novelisation I've ever read, just because it feels like a genuine novel rather than an adaptation (probably has something to do with the fact Wood was also the co-author of the screenplay); if you didn't know, I doubt you'd be able to tell it was based on a movie. Tonally, it just feels so fundamentally different from the film, even if the plot and scenes are essentially the same.
