One of my favorite authors, Michael Crichton, died yesterday. Like alot of my friends my age, the first Michael Crichton book I read was Jurassic Park, specifically because this was right before the movie version was released. So I suppose it was in the spring of 1993 (the last half of 8th grade) when I read it...and I loved it. Jurassic Park was my first ever "I read the book before the movie" book, and spent a good deal of the movie remembering back to the book. Nerd stuff, I know. But it made me want to check out more from Crichton.

The next book of his I picked up was Sphere, which I was also very fond of (the movie can burn in hell, though). Since this was in the days before there were 30 or so Barnes and Nobles and Borders scattered around the city, I got my copy at Wal-Mart. About 115 pages in, as I turned the page, the book started over at page one...and went on to page 115 again, then jumped to 331 (or so, these numbers are all guesses somewhere in the ballpark). Some crazy printing and/or binding error had somehow doubled up the first 115 pages in the book. I was rattled and irritated, and had to have my mom drive me back to Wal-Mart to swap it out. I sometimes shake my fist at mass-market paperbacks!

In the years after that, I plowed through Congo, The Andromeda Strain, tried to read Disclosure, loved loved loved The Lost World, kinda enjoyed Airframe, loved Timeline, thought Prey was pretty good, really dug State of Fear, and loved Next. One of the craziest things about Crichton was the mystery surrounding his later books before they were released. I seriously knew nothing at all about State of Fear and Next before street date...and it was by design. His books were events; an author bigger than the subject of his novels. You didn't pick it up because it was about nanoparticle robots or the sham that is global warming or genetic engineering...you picked it up because it was Crichton.

Word is there's one more novel out there he finished before his death, to be published in May of 2009. Naturally, there are no details to be found about it anywhere...