If Dirk Pitt ever stepped off the page and into real life, Clive Cussler would drop to his knees and blow him.
He has such creepy man-love for Dirk, descrbing his rippling muscles, flat stomache, is it “aquamarine” eyes, or am I mis-membering? Dirk is literally a flawless character, everyone who has met him loves him and has undying loyalty to him. His enemies respect him as much as they fear him. Tedious.
Still doesn’t explain why I’ve read every damn one of those books… :rolleyes:
I read Raise the Titanic when it was first released in paperback, decades ago. I was reasonably entertained and it sparked a lingering interest in the real Titanic. I’ve tried reading a several more since then and never managed to finish one. They are absolutely dreadful; and this comes from a man who read and enjoyed The Destroyer and Mack Bolan series’ for many years.
I love how all of these complaints end with this sort of comment. I’ll bet Cussler reads stuff like this, and just laughs all the way to the bank.
(Yeah, I’ve read 'em all too. Shut up.)
The latest book (I can’t even remember the title, even though I just read it a few months ago), has to have one of the most implausable plot lines of any Clive Cussler novel, and that is saying a lot. I won’t go into too much detail, but it has something to do with cutting a gigantic tunnel through Nicaragua that somehow goes undetected for years. And yet, I keep reading them. These books are the Twinkies of literature.
Nitpick: That’s the second to latest. The latest has to do with a bio-engineered pathogen release. A little more plausible this time around.
I’ve never actually read a Cussler book but I did pick up a audio version (narrated by Tom Wopat, I think it was Sahara?) somewhere around 12 years ago. I figured an action adventure/mystery thing would be fun to listen to on a long drive. :smack: Wow, was I wrong. It was so dreadful. And I’ve discovered that bad prose you might skip over while reading because you’re following the plot is almost physically painful to listen to…
I had the surreal experience of reading in one of these books how the bad guys had taken the SS United States and were using it for nefarious purposes as I was sitting about 100 feet from the ship.
I suspect it would be horrible for me to actually experience every word. I do tend to skip lots of paragraphs which describe Dirk’s manliness and philosophy of life.
his writing partner in the austin series is also his diving partner. must fund the dives.
I listen to the books on tape precisely because I don’t have to read every word. I can tune out an entire cassette and really not be that far behind. When I have a Cussler tape in the deck, I frequently forget I am listening.
Hmm, it’s the opposite for me. When I’m reading, it’s easy to skim and skip the crappy stuff. With books on tape, I hear every word. If I tune out, I lose track of what’s going on. I’m much pickier with the quality of books on tape than I am with real books. (although, I will admit as I grow older, fewer and fewer books have enough novelty of plot to keep me reading a badly written book the way I might have when I was younger.)
I’ve only read one Cussler book. It didn’t take.
Don’t you hate it when you discover a new author or a new series and think, “Hey, this will keep me occupied for months!”, and then discover that by the second book, they’ve exhausted all their plot ideas and are not just phoning it in but possibly semaphores?
A few years back, I read a couple of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpatti(sp?) books. Not too bad – they had the usual omniscient superintelligent serial killer cliche, but she backed the story up with some reasonable forensic detail. But by the third book I read, the interesting nuggets of science had pretty much dried up and now we were concerned with the whiney niece, the character’s pathetic love life and her propensity to (figuratively) go down into darkened basements on her own with no flashlight.
I can’t remember which book it was (one of the last five, I think), but I recall reading about the plot to crash a liquid natural gas tanker into the World Trade Center on September 12, 2001. Now that’s creepy.
And I’ve also read them all, which I think is something not an overwhelming amount of women could (or maybe would) say. I didn’t make it through the latest (Black Wind?). I’m hoping to go back and finish it someday, if only to say I did.