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
