Rank the Novels and Short Stories

[BeauButabi]

I started reading all the Fleming books earlier this year, and just finished the last one today. I don't know if there's ever been a ranking thread here on Cienscape, but I thought I'd start on now anyways. Here's my ranking (star rating out of four):

Novels:
The Man With The Golden Gun****
Diamonds Are Forever****
Goldfinger****
Casino Royale****
The Spy Who Loved Me***1/2
From Russia With Love***1/2
On Her Majesty's Secret Service***1/2
Moonraker***
Thunderball***
Live And Let Die**1/2
Doctor No*1/2
You Only Live Twice*

Short Stories:
Quantum Of Solace****
The Living Daylights****
Octopussy****
Risico****
The Hildebrand Rarity***1/2
The Property Of A Lady***
For Your Eyes Only***
From A View To A Kill**
007 In New York1/2

[Kara Milovy]

Tough.

Novels (from best to worst):
Thunderball
From Russia With Love
Casino Royale
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Moonraker
The Spy Who Loved Me
Doctor No
Diamonds Are Forever
Goldfinger
The Man With The Golden Gun
Live And Let Die
You Only Live Twice

Short Stories (from best to worst):
The Living Daylights
For Your Eyes Only
The Hildebrand Rarity
Risico
007 In New York
Octopussy
The Property Of A Lady
Quantum Of Solace

[Cooper]

It is tough to choose one over the other with a majority of Fleming's Bond novels but I am surprised to see two books given more praise then I think they deserve. I love the Fleming books. When I finished one, I had to go on and read another and was a little sad to reach the end. (However I still have two or three short stories to read.) But there were two books I truly did not enjoy...

I found Diamonds Are Forever to be BAH-RUTAL! It was the first one I picked up becuase 1) I had never seen the movie and 2) with the new cover designs, it was the one that I was most comfortable with being seen reading on the subway. (no nearly naked women) The book just didn't feel like Bond to me and I had to trudge though it.

The Spy Who Loved Me was actually the last Fleming book I read. It was fine, but it felt like an overblown short story. I kind of liked the idea of seeing a Bond adventure from the another angle, but I would have liked it if the story Bond came into was another espionage tale. ...not the theft of a couple of Motel tvs. ...I mean really.

So those two would be at the bottom of my list. To seperate the rest is tough..... I liked them all. Although special mention goes to Moonraker. Loved that the case took place entirely in England and loved the villain... a great Bond girl, to boot.
I liked the weirdness of You Only Live Twice... the Death Castle and Blofeld's complete derangement. The Man With The Golden Gun has an outstanding beginning and I love the tale of Bond's redemption, working on a minor case. The end scenes of Bond crawling through the mud with his gun clenched in his teeth provide us with a powerful image of Bond's primal killer instincts and the moral concessions he has to make in his line of work.

The short stories I liked were A View to a Kill, For Your Eye's Only (Bond taking on a mission of revenge for M... showed a good dynamic between the two of them)

Man.... sorry about the novel here... I could just go on and on about these books.

[Daltons Chin Dimple]

Moonraker is one of my favourites. I live but a stones throw away from most of the locations in that book and was, in fact, shopping in a street where the car chase occurs only yesterday lunchtime.

I also found DAF to be one hell of a tough read.

LALD is pretty amazing, and an insight into how attitudes to race may, or may not, have changed since Flemings time.

Not a real fan of anything Gardner did. I own them all and read them from time to time, but feels too much like an awkward compromise between cinematic 007 and literary 007 without getting the spirit of either of them totally right.

[Kara Milovy]

I'm in the process of rereading. I've only read them each once, believe it or not. I loved Thunderball. I think Domino is the best-written woman in the series, she's amazing and complex. Honeychile Ryder is also a great Bond girl.

I liked parts of DAF but the choo-choo train was terrible and the whole Saratoga Springs mud bath thing was bad as well.

[Daltons Chin Dimple]

Sometimes I think Fleming was ill at ease with how to portray America and American's in his works. Funny really, as he was a committed Yankophile.

[Kara Milovy]

His American dialogue was often stiff, and his gangster dialogue was laughable. He could never get the cadence right. Anywhere American gangsters appear (DAF, TMWTGG, TSWLM) the story gets weak.