Recommendations of James Bond books

Cover of the book You Only Live Twice

A friend of mine asked recommendations about the early Ian Fleming books. This is what I replied to him:

For early Ian Fleming it’s best to start from the beginning: the first Bond book was Casino Royale (1953), which introduced Bond and his lifestyle plus gave the character a big push with a plot twist. However, the structure of this book is not quite as tight as in later Bond adventures.

 

Bond doesn’t much evolve in the books, but some of the books refer lightly to earlier adventures, so you get most out of them if you read them in order, but it’s not a requirement for their enjoyment. Nevertheless, it’s good to be aware that the order of the books was different than the order in which they were eventually filmed.

It’s been a while since I’ve read most of the books, but I remember I liked best Diamonds Are Forever (1956), because of it’s detailed description of how diamond smugglers work, Goldfinger (1959), because it has a great mix of high class villains and high class women and Bond gets to play with both of them, and You Only Live Twice (1964), because of the insights into old Japanese culture.

From Russia With Love (1957) was a hugely popular in it’s time, because the president John F. Kennedy listed it as one of his favourite books. Incidently, the story is about how Soviet spies get fed up with Bond’s excellence in defeating their plans and try to set a trap for him – in a form of a beautiful Soviet female agent, of course.

It’s also good to know that the last three Bond books Fleming wrote – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), You Only Live Twice (1964) and The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) – actually tell one big story, and it’s propably very good to read them in order.

And the one catch: The Spy Who Loved Me (1961) is very different from all of the other books. Fleming wrote it from a perspective of a woman, and Bond is just a small side character in her story, so that’s not a good book to begin with.

You can find the order of the books from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming

Quantum of Solace teaser follows previous formula

The teaser trailer for the upcoming James Bond film Quantum of Solace was released on Monday and guess what – it’s basically a remake of the Casino Royale (the previous Bond film) teaser trailer.

Here’s the new Quantum of Solace teaser (and you can also find it on the official 007 site):

Compare the above with teaser for Casino Royale from two years ago (also available on Apple’s trailer site):

There’s definitely similarities. First there’s a relatively slow build up with M scolding Bond (with the idea of one of the smaller villains talking down to Bond taken from the final trailer for Casino Royale) followed by a potpourri of action scenes, with images of scantily clad Daniel Craig and Bond girls thrown in for good measure.

I know it worked very well last time (Casino Royale was a major success), so you can’t blame for them using the same format for cutting the clips together. Still, a few surprises in the teaser would have been nice for fans.

Here’s a good example of a more original approach when talking about Bond teasers. It’s from 2002’s Die Another Day, the last Pierce Brosnan Bond film:

I just love the way those sand dunes turn into Bond girls and the bullet morphs into Bond’s car, plus as a bonus you can here her blow the smoke in the end. Nice touch.

James Bond will return in Blu

It’s official: to promote the theatrical release of the 22nd (by official counting) James Bond film Quantum of Solace, MGM and Fox are bringing the early adventures of the secret agent on Blu-ray worldwide on October 20th.

In this batch, six Bond films are getting the high definition treatment: Dr No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973), For Your Eyes Only (1981) and Die Another Day (2002). That’s three from Sean Connery era, two from Roger Moore and one from Pierce Brosnan.

You’ve got to admire their press release, which makes it sound like this high definition re-mastering and restoration process they did was just for this Blu-ray release:

Recently restored and re-mastered for the highest quality picture and sound quality via the state-of-the-art Lowry process digital frame-by-frame restoration and featuring special features galore, Bond is primed for Blu-ray Disc with a selection of 007 adventures spanning the storied career of cinema’s most recognisable spy.

I’m betting though that the restoration they’re referring to is the one they made when they released the Ultimate Edition dvds in 2006. Here’s what Macworld.co.uk wrote about the restoration process back then:

The project team also worked to a higher resolution than DVDs support, offering a route forward to release the digitised classics on other formats in future. The film was scanned at a resolution of 4,000 x 3,000 pixels, in contrast with the 720 x 576 pixel resolution of DVDs. This meant that each frame of each movie weighed in at 45MB.

That would mean that essentially all they’ve done now compared to the Ultimate Edition dvds is that they’ve upped the pixel count on the image from dvd quality (576i) to high definition quality (1080p). That’s certainly something, of course, if you’ve got a Blu-ray player and a large screen, but those who already own the Ultimate Edition dvds and don’t have big television sets are propably not missing anything too essential when the new high definition discs arrive.

Unless they decide to release the discs with new extra features.