Skip to main content

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

When I heard there was a coming bowdlerization of Ian Fleming's works, that our cultural overlords decided James Bond needed to be sanitized[1] for the dainty modern reader, I decided I'd better read some of these novels for myself before they got butchered.

Casino Royale is the first in the series, and it's well-told. The story is laid out at first indirectly, via intelligence reports and flashbacks; then when the action picks up, the author tells the story in real time. The book is better in some ways than the movie(s), not least because the written James Bond is a more credible character than the movie version[2]. Rather than the Mary Sue we know from the movies, here Bond is believably human: beset by doubts, uncertainties, even unease.

There's one silly deus ex machina event in the story, but it's made up for by an unexpected twist ending. All in all a readable, solidly three-out-of-five stars book. It won't change your life but it passes the time. 


[1] Yes, it's true, sadly. The institution that owns the rights to Fleming's work employed "sensitivity readers" to look through and remove anything "offensive."

[2] Unfortunately the movies have permanently altered my internal narrator: my brain plays Sean Connery's voice in my head for all of Bond's dialog. A similar thing happened to me when reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's (unexpectedly interesting) autobiography!

More Posts

Perpetuity by Kevin Joseph [new fiction release]

A fast-moving, speculative sci-fi thriller, and a fun read!  After helping a fellow runner who cut her foot on a nail, a young doctor inadvertently discovers a dangerous secret in her blood, a secret that puts them in direct conflict with shadowy forces in the biotech industry. Suddenly, they find themselves running for their lives, threatened by the US government... and even more powerful enemies. Perpetuity uses several character perspectives, and the reader gradually pieces together the book's reality through various characters' eyes. I appreciate any novel that is well-structured to the point that the reader doesn't actually "see" the structure, but can just enjoy the story as it unfolds. It's harder to do than it looks. The author has a tight, noirish writing style and a knack for capturing archetypal characters. Two examples: you'll meet a smarmy, arriviste tech CEO rendered perfectly, right down to the condescending internal monologue running in hi...
Read more

The Wars of America (Vol 1) by Robert Leckie

This is a massive and capably-written history, the first of two volumes. It will fill in a lot of the cracks in any reader's historical knowledge of the USA--especially if you're like me, someone whose historical knowledge has more cracks than foundation. Recommended as either a starting point to learn about each conflict, or as a finishing point to groove and firm up what you already know. Before I get to the book itself, let me share a brief thought on the absolute necessity of reading history--but specifically, reading history from historians who lived outside your own time period.  Current history writing is subject to a variety of problems, starting with the historians themselves, who are necessarily products of the time in which they live. They hold their era's consensus narratives, and they'll have no choice but to filter their views through modernity. The modern publishing industry adds yet another layer of problems: it acts as a gatekeeping institution, both di...
Read more

The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner

This short and humble book will be priceless to an open-minded reader.  It discusses how to cultivate present-moment awareness, how to focus on process rather than product, how to make haste slowly, and many other practices that are increasingly indispensable in our haste-filled, results-oriented modern era. Several years ago I heard an unforgettable story from the owner of a language school in Santiago, Chile. She told me about a disgruntled customer who had been taking Spanish classes for weeks, but wasn't getting any better. This student complained, loudly, "I paid my money. Where is my Spanish?" This story stuck with me for well over a decade because it's a metaphor for how people confuse buying something with learning something, confuse "taking a class" with actually learning a domain and developing a sincere practice of that domain. We've productized so much of life in the modern era that people think they can buy language fluency off the shelf, li...
Read more