I just finished reading Sphere...

God damn that book is a mind-fuck!

I'm not going to go into details on my feelings on the story for fear of ruining the plot for anyone, but I think it's the best book I've read all year. It's the first Crichton book I've read and man, that guy really knows how to keep the pages turning.

I can't wait for Drew and Dan's "Bomb After Reading" podcast on it. I really hope they keep doing this sort of book club thingy if they keep reading books as bat-shit crazy as Sphere. So in other words, thanks duders for giving me a reason to read it!

@bigmess: Go read Jurassic Park and Congo now.

What this guy said , those are two really good books and glad that you like the book too.

Crichton was one hell of an author. He passed away too early.

Crichton is a fantastic author that really does his research for each book. Like Jurassic Park was describing genetics and dna sequencing back in 1990 (I'm an R&D scientist at a sequencing company) and a bunch of the stuff that was quasi-science fiction back then is fact now. And the Lost World is deep in animal ecology (I got my degree in ecology) and that stuff is really well studied & handled. I just finished Sphere, and lots of cool space travel ideas as well as psychology. I haven't read a lot of his stuff, but man is he great.

Yeah, I thought it was pretty good, too. It has a lot in common with The Andromeda Strain, which I guess makes sense since I think I read somewhere that he was writing both of those books at the same time. The ending was interesting, I didn't even pick up on the little hint for some reason though.

Also, I tried watching the movie adaption last night, with Samuel L. Jackson and Queen Latifah. I made it a little less than half way through. It is not a good movie.

The Lost World is an amazing book.

I love the Jurassic Park novel, but one of Steven Spielberg's best ideas was changing John Hammond into an idealist.

@feathered: I keep hearing the movie is pretty awful. I'm guessing Samuel L Jackson is Harry? That might be worth seeing.

I just don't think there's anyway a movie could live up to my expectations from the book.

I also just finished the book, and for the most part really enjoyed it.

I felt like it got a little cheap towards the end, boiling character motivations down to overly simplistic "The sphere's powers are making them craaAaaAAzyy!" which, while making sense in the context of the plot, felt pretty unsatisfying considering how much the book focused on the characters before that point. Similarly, it seems like Crichton REALLY wanted to de-emphasize the actual mystery behind the sphere and the ship, which also felt a little lame considering how much it had been built-up. And this is more of a minor thing, but man did I get tired of the "X said. Y said." in this book. Describe people's voices more, Michael!

Really excited for the Bomb After Reading.

@feathered: Sphere could've been a pretty good Christopher Nolan movie (not so different from the kind of nutso reveals that The Prestige and Interstellar have at the end), but instead the actual Sphere movie tells the story pretty clumsily and changes some character/plot details and I remember disliking the changes. The Sphere movie was too afraid to have quiet moments of uncertainty and doubt (something that I think Interstellar was great at).

@bigmess: It's not worth seeing. Samuel L Jackson is literally the only person whose acting is passable in that movie.

I kind of hope Dan and Drew do a livestream of them watching the movie. I don't know if that's possible, but it'd be reeeeeall dumb in the best way possible.

@bigmess: What I learned from Screened is that doing livestream commentary (or Osar broadcast) of a full movie is nigh impossible. At best, they could say "At home, start the movie....NOW." But basically no part of the movie video or audio could be in the recording if it's going to be the entire movie. It would have to just be audio/video of Dan and Drew and their commentary/reactions.

I just finished reading it myself and really enjoyed it. Crichton sure did a good job at incentivizing me to keep turning those pages. Love it when I find one of those books. On a related note I got The Andromeda Strain not too long after starting sphere. Really looking forward to that. And I know I'll probably regret it, but I have to see the movie at this point. Anyways, hope they get on that podcast soon while it's still fresh on my mind.

As someone on the other side of the fence, I suppose... I've never read the book but have seen the movie (recently). It's not terrible. I'm sure the book is much better but there are things in the movie that make you question character's motives and who you should believe. So it's effective in that regard. I think Dustin Hoffman is okay in it as the lead and, yes, Samuel L. Jackson is Harry.

I look forward to listening to the podcast about it.

Ya, it's a good book. I like the movie too, though.

You should read Jurassic Park and also The Lost World if only because they are actually way better than their movie counter parts. Jurassic Park as a movie is pretty intense, but the book is so much better.

Ya, Crichton wrote some great books.

I also finished Sphere last week and am looking forward to the podcast.

It's the first Crichton book I've read and I really enjoyed it. It's a hell of a page turner. The discussion of scientific and psychological theories and topics was all really interesting too.

I was ready to get The Andromeda Strain from the library yesterday but they didn't have it, so I picked up Timeline instead. I'm about 200 pages in and while it's not quite as good as Sphere, it's still pretty solid so far. There's plenty of talk about quantum mechanics in here. I knew nothing about it before, it's fascinating.

Read Eaters of the Dead, it's awesome.

I, too, just finished reading Sphere, and I shall add: hell yeah bring on the podcast!

As for the book itself, it was rather good. I quite liked it, and read through it awfully fast relative to my usual slow pace, just started it on Saturday and kinda didn't think I'd be done till next week at the earliest.

Possibly slightly spoilery stuff about movie and book and differences or similarities therein:

I find it difficult to understand that someone read the book Sphere and think, "this would make a good movie"!

It could have been a good movie, but the screenwriter and director butchered it. The pacing is all wrong, the things they added cheese it up (The sphere flying off into space at the end and the multiple copies of 20'000 Leagues Under the Sea. The former tries real hard to be poignant and the latter eerie or thrilling, but they both just come off as ridiculous.) and the things they removed make the story not make sense and the characters act illogically (In the book, Jerry only responds on screen when Harry is in the room because Jerry = Harry. It made the reveal meaningful. In the movie Jerry just seems to talk to Norman whenever it's convenient whether or not Harry is anywhere to be seen. Then Norman out of the blue just sits down and figures it out. In the book, when Beth is trying to convince Norman to take the tranquilizer because she believes he is responsible for the manifestations, he begins to really doubt his sanity until he sees a video of Beth entering the sphere which is when he figures out she's nuts and decides take a major chance and blow the hatch and get out. In the movie he just takes the extreme risk of blowing the hatch to escape with no sanity questioning or reveal of Beth having entered the sphere. All nuance of character is lost and his motivations are made to seem purely selfish.)

But, I didn't like the book much either. Jurassic Park is a much better book and film.

As someone who really enjoyed the movie, I decided to actually read the book in preperation for the Bomb After Reading podcast.

I still really like the movie, and I think it's much better than the book. So many parts about the squid in the book would have been terribly cheesy if done in the film. They were pretty cheesy even in writing. And the characters in the book were all such cliches, such stereotypes. Stereotypes that complained too much about their own stereotypes. Harry was a genius black man that complained about being ostracized for being black and smart. Beth was a muscular woman that was paranoid about men trying to control her and use her and think less of her for being a woman. Ted was a pretentious intellectual, constantly quoting historic writings. The writing of the character dialogue felt amateurish and made them all seem like bickering children. I significantly prefer the movie's version of the characters. The dialogue was better. More thrilling and mind-opening. They don't really go into much detail about why they should forget the power in the book, other than that it's the only thing that makes sense considering the design of the future spaceship. I much prefer the movie's way of explaining it. The ship's log having an "unknown entry event" that could only be unknown if they weren't alive to talk about it. And in the film they talk about all the horrible things that the power will do. Beth talking about being afraid of waking up having manifested all kinds of weird nightmare things in her apartment, and what that power will be like if it falls into the wrong hands. And that the wrong hands would be anyone's hands. Even in the hands of smart considerate people, they still manifested evil destructive things. That stuff isn't even mentioned in the book, but it was greatly written for the film.

I think this is what Chris Watters was looking for in his Sphere movie.

The overuse of the word "said" is endemic of Crichton novels. I read a few of his books over the summer and once I realized it it drove me NUTS. Literally using "said" for a dozen lines of back and forth conversation. Eventually I just tuned it out but it made me think that the guy wasn't really a great writer just someone with tremendous plots.

Crichton always had great details and put a ton of research into his writing, he just wasn't really that good of an author ultimately. But definitely spawned some interesting movie franchises, good and bad.

Really? I've always found Crichton to be a terrible writer. He reminds me a lot of Dan Brown in that he's imaginative but can't write to save his life.