Try some David Foster Wallace; couldn’t hurt.
Wow, I still remember how it felt to read the opening hundred pages of Sphere back in fifth grade. Just the way everything unfolded was great, with the protagonist getting briefed on the expedition to investigate a vessel sunk at the bottom of the Pacific, then finding out that it might be a spaceship of some kind . . . while simultaneously learning that it had been there for 300 years. As soon as you’ve got your head around those facts, he reveals that the ship has an American flag painted on it, with 52 stars. It was absolutely incredible pacing, and I read it all the way through to the end, even though it did drag on towards the finish. Not to mention figuring out what the sphere was, and deciphering the code to talk to it; I had only read books in my elementary school library, and no one told me you were allowed (or able) to do these things when you were writing.
I read Congo, too, and I loved those scholarly-looking footnotes that let you suspend disbelief and just get lost in the story (and ditto for Eaters of the Dead).
I guess I lost interest in high school, after reading Rising Sun. It was a perfectly good detective story, IIRC, but the ridiculous stereotypes in there rubbed me the wrong way. There was so much xenophobia in that book about how the Asians will buy up everything because they don’t play by the rules and they’re amoral and calculating and soon our country will be a private fief of Japanese businessmen, and then plays ‘fair and balanced’ with a tacked-on epilogue. From what I heard about this global warming novel, that sounds like par for the course.
As to the baby-raping critic, all I can say is I don’t really care who you like and don’t like or who’s invited to your birthday party, and I don’t care at all what names you call people when they level legitimate criticisms about you, but don’t fucking bring it up while I’m trying to read, Goddamnit!
Well, God damn. 
What sad news.
Crichton was never a SDMB favorite, but I liked him. I remember that Jurassic Park was the first “grown-up” book I ever read. The dinosaur skeleton on the cover looked cool.
Damn.
I read that book long before the movie was made and had no idea what it was about. And if you don’t know anything about it that final scene in the prologue is pretty damn compelling.
To wit:
* “Something struck him lightly in the chest. At first he thought it was an insect but, glancing down at his khaki shirt, he saw a spot of red, and a fleshy bit of red fruit rolled down his shirt to the muddy ground. The damned monkeys were throwing berries. He bent over to pick it up. And then he realized it was not a piece of fruit at all. It was a human eyeball, crushed and slippery in his fingers, pinkish white with a shred of optic nerve still attached at the back.
He swung his gun around and looked over to where Misulu was sitting on the rock. Misulu was not there.
Kruger moved across the campsite. Overhead, the colobus monkeys fell silent. He heard his boots squish in the mud as he moved past the tents of sleeping men. And then he heard the wheezing sound again. It was an odd, soft sound, carried on the swirling morning mist. Kruger wondered if he had been mistaken, if it was really a leopard.
And he saw Misulu. Misulu lay on his back, in a kind of halo of blood. His skull had been crushed from the sides, the facial bones shattered, the face narrowed and elongated, the mouth open in an obscene yawn, the one remaining eye wide and bulging. The other eye had exploded outward with the force of the impact.
Kruger felt his heart pounding as he bent to examine the body. He wondered what could have caused such an injury. And then he heard the soft wheezing sound again, and this time he felt quite sure it was not a leopard. Then the colobus monkeys began their shrieking, and Kruger leapt to his feet and screamed.”*
Missed the edit window.
I just wanted to add that I read the ending of Sphere to my two neices when they were about twelve and nine years old. Scared the you-know-what out of 'em, it did. (Sphere was one of a three-books-in-one Chrichton book that I found at the bookstore, the others being Congo and Eaters of the Dead.) They made me read 'em more scary stuff from the other two when I was done. 
The good news is we may be able to clone him from a strand of his preserved DNA.
To me he was always a good fun read. I just happen to be in the middle of Timeline because I found it lying around here.
He may well have been a wonderful person, may he rest in peace, but as a writer he was a complete anti-science hack, right back to the inexplicably praised Andromeda Strain (hint: two minutes thought about bacteria would make it clear why an infection/epidemic couldn’t randomly mutate to have every individual NOT attack it’s current target). He doesn’t include science in his books, just the trappings of it, as if science isn’t about critical thinking, experiment, and careful controls to avoid self-delusion, but is about white lab coats and fancy equipment, like some kind of cargo cultist.
I assume there’s some kind of link between not being able to understand science and always having a theme of scientists being completely wrong or bringing down destruction upon innocent humans, but I’m not interested in chasing down his personal history to look for clues.
Off course he went completely off the deep end in his later years, as scientists started having an actual (though tiny) effect on public policy.
I am by no means a big fan. I read a couple of his books and enjoyed them (and enjoyed some of the movies). But I am pretty sure he had some understanding of sciences. It doesn’t take much chasing down, just look at Wikipedia:
The man found a formula for writing popular fiction, thats all.
I’m no scientist, so I cannot comment on the validity of the science in most of his books, but I do know a bit or two about IT, and his knowledge of the subject in Disclosure was more or less sound. His dicription of the Corridor is not too far off from Virtual Reality as we know it now, and the manufacturing process of CD-ROM players was pretty decent. Of course he never let the science interfere with the story, plot development was always more important than the actual formulas, but I believe that whenever the science allowed it, it was more on the mark than off.
Same thing with quantum theory in Timeline. What I understand of the subject from reading articles on the internet, which is admittedly not much, I believe that the basics are there too. Of course, it is still science fiction, so whenever the science doesn’t fit, he skims over it. Fair enough, I say.
Hmm, forgot to add: cloning of extinct species as in Jurassic Park now seems possible to, according to this linkabout reviving the Tasmanian Tiger. Sounds like the guy isn’t too far from his rocker after all.
A local author I know here is fond of saying: “Never let Truth get in the way of telling a good story.” Or words to that effect. Yeah, if you’ve got a great idea for something like Timeline or Jurassic Park, you don’t want to abandon the project altogether if you can fudge the details just a bit.
Looks like the release date for his last book has been pushed back to May 4, 2009. It’s still untitled.
From Newsday.com:
“No lunch with Michael lasted less than three hours and no subject was too prosaic or obscure to attract his interest. Sexual politics, medical and scientific ethics, anthropology, archaeology, economics, astronomy, astrology, quantum physics, and molecular biology were all regular topics of conversation.”
<snip>
“I have a lot of trouble with things that don’t seem true to me,” Crichton said at the time, his large, manicured hands gesturing to his graphs. “I’m very uncomfortable just accepting. There’s something in me that wants to pound the table and say, ‘That’s not true.’”
<snip>
*In a 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Crichton came with a tape recorder, text books and a pile of graphs and charts as he defended “State of Fear” and his take on global warming. *[bolding mine]
He spoke to few scientists about his questions, convinced that he could interpret the data himself. “If we put everything in the hands of experts and if we say that as intelligent outsiders, we are not qualified to look over the shoulder of anybody, then we’re in some kind of really weird world,” he said.
<snip>
“The initial response from the (Japanese) establishment was, ‘You’re a racist,’” he told the AP. “So then, because I’m always trying to deal with data, I went on a tour talking about it and gave a very careful argument, and their response came back, ‘Well you say that but we know you’re a racist.’”
So it appears that oftentimes Crichton did considerable research on his own, came by his questions and/or disbelief honestly as a result, and then, exhaustive cites in hand, found his documentation dismissed by an audience that had its mind made up beforehand.