Casino Royale
Introducing James Bond: charming, sophisticated, handsome, chillingly ruthless and licensed to kill. This, the first of Ian Fleming's tales of secret agent 007, finds Bond on a mission to neutralize a lethal, high-rolling Russian operative called simply "le Chiffre" -- by ruining him at the Baccarat table and forcing his Soviet spymasters to "retire" him. It seems that lady luck is taken with 007 -- le Chiffre has hit a losing streak. But some people just refuse to play by the rules, and Bond's attraction to a beautiful female agent leads him to disaster and an unexpected savior...
Stats for nerds
2recommend
11mentions
11people
2010–2025years
18% recommend73% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Until Fleming started writing the books with the films in mind, Bond was already a very different Bond.
The books are uneven, IMHO, but "Casino Royale", the first of Fleming's novels — written well before the "Dr. No" film — is enjoyable and will give you a very different Bond from what you are used to. Insecure, self-doubting, no "gadgets".... "Diamonds Are Forever" was perhaps my favorite of the books though.
(The film "Goldfinger" actually improved upon the plot of the original book in my opinion — in the book Goldfinger actually tries to steal the gold from Fort Knox.)
- Ian Fleming wrote 2000 words per day and was able to produce a v1 of a novel in 6 weeks. This appeared on HN a couple of weeks ago:
https://lithub.com/ian-fleming-explains-how-to-write-a-thril...
I read Casino Royale (the first Bond installment) for the first time last week; it's quite good and fast-paced. The chapters follow the 2000 words rule quite closely, and it's working.
- I read 52 books this year:
- Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
- The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
- When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté
- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
- The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
- Standing Strong by John MacArthur
- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
- We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan B. Peterson
- I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek
- The Holy Bible
- Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef
- I Am Giorgia by Giorgia Meloni
- 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
- The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren
- The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray
- The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray
- The War on the West by Douglas Murray
- Porn Generation by Ben Shapiro
- The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen
- Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
- Moonraker by Ian Fleming
- Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming
- From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
- Dr No by Ian Fleming
- Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
- For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming
- Thunderball by Ian Fleming
- The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming
- You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming
- The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Next year I will read more books of the Russian writers on this list. I enjoyed those books very much.
After seeing this list, what books do you recommend for me?
- Just finished Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- A few months ago I listened to Casino Royale (narrator Dan Stevens, pretty good) and was kind of bummed at just how poorly it read. It's an OK story with very middling language, badly in need of an editor especially around the end. I was surprised that it received so much popularity when written. But maybe it only could get popular at the time, when the English were in need of a certain kind of hero.
I decided to re-read (via audiobook) my favorite John Le Carre novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (narrator Michael Jayston, one of the best audiobook performances I have ever listened to). So wildly different to have them back-to-back. It made me appreciate Le Carre all the more.
Speaking of audiobooks, Le Carre's own memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life is read by himself and is a must-listen if you like his books. To hear him tell his own tales, with his own accents for the people in his life, definitely one of the cases where the audiobook format is superior.
- Yea, I had the good fortune of reading it in a class in school where we went through a number of spy thriller books as a genre exercise. Reading it alongside something like the original Casino Royale by Ian Fleming is a really interesting pairing. In some ways, it's similar to other splits in genre - Neuromancer vs. Snow Crash, Agatha Christie vs. Conan Doyle. Neither is objectively better, but they both set the tone of the genre for the next century.
Both Fleming and Le Carre had experienced real-world spycraft, and so their competing visions of fiction both had the pedigree of realism, but applied in different ways and with different worldviews.
