Even more tedious than professional sports (if you can imagine such a thing...)

I enjoy reading the novels of Michael Crichton. I don't know why. They aren't great--some of them are really bad--but I like them. I recommend Timeline, Micro, Next, The Andromeda Strain, Prey, and, of course, Jurassic Park, but not Airframe, Rising Sun, Pirate Latitudes, Sphere, or Congo, and definitely not Disclosure.


Things I Don't Like About the Works of Michael Crichton

• The characters are rarely memorable and there are often far too many of them (especially in Next, which involves, among many, many others, the owner of a biotech firm, an investor in the biotech firm, a pair of private investigators tracking them both, the owner of a different biotech firm, his wife, his divorce lawyer, a researcher at the biotech firm, his mother, his brother, their distant cousins, his lab assistant, the assistant's mother, the assistant's sister, the assistant's recently deceased father who may or may not have been taking steroids, a team of grave robbers who may or may not have removed the bones from the limbs of the corpse of the recently deceased father who may or may not have been taking steroids, a transgenic parrot, and two people named Jamie).
• He does not understand children.
• He reuses names a lot (and this is probably only a problem for me) so if you're reading a whole bunch of his books in a row you're bound to get very confused.

Things I Like About the Works of Michael Crichton

• He explains complicated things really well.
• They are the sort of books that make you want to walk around doing everything one-handed while you read them, and are short enough to do so.
• Ian Malcolm.

He gets his own bullet point because of the following passage from Jurassic Park.

Ellie said, "Isn't it a little warm for black?"

"...[N]o, as a matter of fact, black is an excellent color for heat. If you remember your black-body radiation, black is actually best in heat. Efficient radiation. In any case, I wear only two colors, black and gray...These colors are appropriate for any occasion," Malcolm continued, "and they go well together, should I mistakenly put on a pair of gray socks with my black trousers."

"But don't you find it boring to wear only two colors?"

"Not at all. In fact, I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing," Malcolm said. "I don't want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports."

"Dr. Malcolm," Hammond explained, "is a man of strong opinions."   

"And mad as a hatter," Malcolm said cheerfully. "But you must admit, these are nontrivial issues. We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought." 

Hammond turned to Gennaro and raised his hands. "You invited him."