I also tried reading Jurassic park before that but didn’t make it past 75 pages before I simply lost interest. Michael Crichton wrote that book as an impossibly boring slog. When something is actually happening and meaningful it’s super interesting and well written, and I’m excited for what’s going to happen next, but then that’s all bogged down by three pages of unnecessary technical explanations for things I don’t care about. It’s like he can’t just get to the point. It took all the fun out of what was otherwise an exremely fun read. I might pick it up again sometime and try to finish it, but I can’t see myself spending any time on it soon.
This mirrors my experience with Crichton. The Lost World and Timeline both had intriguing plots, but all the passages spent on technical details simply killed my enjoyment; I abandoned both books before I got halfway through either and haven’t picked up a Crichton novel since.
You know, I had a similar problem reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez. I loved Influx so I started reading Daemon, but the technical junk bogged down the plot too much and I quit reading it. Well, not complex technical explanations of things. The characters would, for example, refer to “IEEE 802.11n” instead of saying “wireless n” or “wi-fi” or “wireless ethernet”; or one character would talk about video games but then think about how he “played Massively Multiplayer Online Games or MMOGs” (it’s MMOs by the way, Suarez -.-) which “are vastly superior in their social aspect” to other games. Let me be clear: people who play games online are not snooty about how their social lives are better than gamers who like single player games.
It just… ugh. People who are knowledgeable about a certain hobby or field don’t frequently extrapolate on the jargon. They use jargon when they’re around people who would understand, and they don’t around people who don’t. But they don’t explain the jargon if it’s not necessary to get the point across. The book Daemon kept using jargon and then explaining what it meant or a character’s opinion about it.