>>it's never really been my kind of thing, I'm afraid.
Ah, yeah. Sadly that's been my experience of trying to get into Colditz, which is why I've only been lurking your posts. (The fannish reaction post version seems to be much more my thing than the actual show, alas.)
>>You're talking about Biggles, right
Ahah, no, you're giving me far too much credit. While I haven't managed to read enough Biggles yet to be confident in an overall assessment of quality, I wouldn't dare lightly dismiss them to the "terrible but id-porn" category. But there is a whole stratum of sub-Biggles books out there, at least where I live, unapologetic hack-work which is pretty much pure idporn poured on a page (although usually written by vetarans, when I can find anything at all about the authors, they're generally not by vetarans who are interested in remembering the war realistically.) The ones I collect, I don't even think have earned a series name - I call them "the old green ones with the biplane on the cover"; and the only reason I limit myself to those is if I acquired *all* the books in that genre I found cheap, I would quickly be buried in them - already I seem to have also acquired a Billy Smith Flying Ace omnibus by accident, because it was also green, and has an airplane on the cover, one presumes.
Do they not have this kind of thing where you live? Is "Biggles" a synecdoche for Boy's Adventure in Britian because for awhile, that's all there was? How tragic that would be! Although you do seem to go for a higher standard of quality in your war stories than I, so maybe not. (TBH I usually read memoir when I want war stories that aren't shameless indulgence; there's a lot of really good WW1 & WW2 memoir out there, like the ones on which Colditz and Hogan's Heroes are based, although one feels more guilty about slashing it.)
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Ah, yeah. Sadly that's been my experience of trying to get into Colditz, which is why I've only been lurking your posts. (The fannish reaction post version seems to be much more my thing than the actual show, alas.)
>>You're talking about Biggles, right
Ahah, no, you're giving me far too much credit. While I haven't managed to read enough Biggles yet to be confident in an overall assessment of quality, I wouldn't dare lightly dismiss them to the "terrible but id-porn" category. But there is a whole stratum of sub-Biggles books out there, at least where I live, unapologetic hack-work which is pretty much pure idporn poured on a page (although usually written by vetarans, when I can find anything at all about the authors, they're generally not by vetarans who are interested in remembering the war realistically.) The ones I collect, I don't even think have earned a series name - I call them "the old green ones with the biplane on the cover"; and the only reason I limit myself to those is if I acquired *all* the books in that genre I found cheap, I would quickly be buried in them - already I seem to have also acquired a Billy Smith Flying Ace omnibus by accident, because it was also green, and has an airplane on the cover, one presumes.
Do they not have this kind of thing where you live? Is "Biggles" a synecdoche for Boy's Adventure in Britian because for awhile, that's all there was? How tragic that would be! Although you do seem to go for a higher standard of quality in your war stories than I, so maybe not. (TBH I usually read memoir when I want war stories that aren't shameless indulgence; there's a lot of really good WW1 & WW2 memoir out there, like the ones on which Colditz and Hogan's Heroes are based, although one feels more guilty about slashing it.)