Book Details
| Title: | Eruption | |
| Author: | James Patterson, Michael Crichton | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 07.19.24 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
| Date Read | Note |
| 07.19.24 | One more Crichton book "found" by his wife and brought to market, this time in a sales wet dream partnership with James Patterson. Looks like a movie deal's already in place, this thing is about the safest bet in the book industry. I hated it. Granted, I don't care for Patterson's style. I remember reading a few Alex Cross books and not liking them. His two-page chapters, his 100-chapter books, but this is beyond that. It's just terribly written. rando characters, hot smart ladies, tropes, no depth, and volcanoes. Part of me wants to think that Crichton's involvement in this was his wife found a folder on the ol hard drive labelled "volcano stuff" and it's all a great big cash-in but the book really belongs to Patterson, but I have a creeping suspicion that there's more Crichton in here than I want there to be. I read through all Crichton's books as a teenager and loved them. They made you feel smart because he'd write about scientific or technological subjects with a great skill that made them palatable and engaging, but I don't think any of his characters were particularly deep or dynamic. And his last few books I remember not liking so well. Prey, State of Fear (a big Oof on that one, looking back), and mostly his last book Next which I remember as a complete mess. It might be that he had lost that spark which led him on such an illustrious career through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Or it might be that I outgrew his style and wanted stuff out of them that he was never great at. In any case, this book is bad. It reads like a script to a bad movie except I think if they actually make a movie out of this thing it'll probably be better because no actors will sign on for parts this thinly written so the script with have to be punched up. The dialogue certainly isn't up to even the worst crap hollywood movies can pass these days. Nothing's explained clear enough to have any tension, new characters get introduced 90% into the book, they're all rando names with forgettable descriptions to they're interchangeable. Those that survive you're not surprised by and those that perish you don't care about. And the science behind the volcanoes - the stuff that feels most Crichton - is not really explained in any interesting way. I guess people are trying to control lava flow now with bombs and digging trenches. That's it. For me the most egregious sin of the book is the macguffin they use to raise the stakes of the eruption and give the book a purpose. I kinda think that back when Crichton was alive there hadn't been major eruptions in Hawaii for a while so he maybe thought it would be interesting, but since then we have! We saw lava crossing roads just a couple years ago... so there has to be this invented random reason to not let the lava flow where it wants to flow and it will literally kill the entire world if lava touches it. But the whole reason they can't move it is the military couldn't get the money to do anything about it so... they spend a crazy amount of resources to dig and raise walls and bomb the volcano instead? I never bought it, continue to not buy it, but i don't feel like going into it here. Let's just say I find it incredibly stupid. So... yeah. Been a while since I've read a book I really didn't like. I kinda questioned why I was bothering to finish it, but you know with those two-page chapters it's an easy enough read and honestly if i didn't finish it I couldn't write this note so... I've written it. Happy, me? |
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