Ian Fleming – Cannonball Read 17

James Bond is alright, I guess.

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

March 29, 2021 by LaneyFace Leave a Comment

I have never been a huge fan of James Bond movies, so unsurprisingly Ian Fleming’s books never pinged my reading radar. My dear friend describes himself as a Bond scholar, so when he asked me to read From Russia with Love with him, I figured, why not? I enjoy a good espionage tale and after recently reading The Spy and the Traitor, the true story of a Russian double-agent for MI6 during the Cold War, the timing for doing so was impeccable. For a Bond […]

The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

March 17, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

I’ve read two other James Bond books — Casino Royale and a story collection with The Living Daylights and Octopussy. This is the second novel I read, and I liked it a lot more than the first one. I think the biggest difference is that I am reminded that James Bond is usually the least interesting part of any James Bond movie or story and the fact that this book doesn’t bring him in until about halfway through makes it much more interesting of a novel. The story involves […]

Get the chest; don’t bother about the head.

Octopussy, The Living Daylights, and Other Storie by Ian Fleming

January 21, 2019 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

So this is an odds and sods collection of leftover James Bond stories published after Ian Fleming died, and a few years into the movie series. It includes two stories that “became films” in the sense that their titles became titles of films. The story “The Living Daylights” forms part of the movie version, but “Octopussy” bears little resemblance to that movie. “Octopussy” is a good short story in the same way that several of Agatha Christie novels are good. Rather than put James Bond […]

Finger. Goldfinger.

September 1, 2018 by Jake 1 Comment

Read for CBR10 Bingo: Birthday between August and November. The fictional James Bond’s birthday has been listed in several sources as November 11. I’ve gotten into Anthony Horowitz’s work this past year so when I saw his James Bond book at a used bookstore, I grabbed it. I later discovered it was a direct sequel to Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger. I hadn’t read Fleming for several years but I remembered liking Casino Royale, warts and all, so I decided to pick it up. Ah man. I’m not a James […]

“Going round the world too quickly is like attending a series of dinner parties and leaving with the soup.”

June 11, 2017 by Halbs 2 Comments

In 1959, The Sunday Times gave James Bond writer Ian Fleming a round-the-world plane ticket and charged him with quickly traveling through 14 of the world’s major cities. (Fleming had been foreign editor for the paper for some time previously.) The result is Fleming’s Thrilling Cities, a memorialized account of the writer’s experiences. While I am a known fan of the James Bond books (you’ll find several of my reviews on this very site), this little non-fiction gem is one of my favorites of all of Fleming’s books. […]

A Case Where the Book and Movie have VASTLY Different Plots

February 21, 2017 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

It would appear that I am in the minority as regards my opinions regarding Moonraker, the third James Bond novel by Sir Ian Fleming. I didn’t much enjoy it. Moonraker is back to the three-act structure we found in Casino Royale, and the three acts are decidedly similar. Act one is background knowledge via gambling, act two is the discovery of the mission and its true scope, act three is the part where Bond makes his moves and recovers from the physical cost of the […]

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