I finished reading Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton. I was mostly disappointed. Mostly I had heard my mother rave about Crichton; I read Pirate Latitudes and Micro (both posthumous works) in high school, which is so long ago I didn't real remember either. What I found was that the prose was very empty, I don't know as I'd outright say that it's bad writing but it doesn't feel like artistic writing. There's different ways you can engage a reader, of course, but compared to most other books I've read that were focused on their high concepts or their plots I thought it was still meandering and just empty. It also took a long time to shift out of its more history-like descriptions in Parts 1 and 2 (which was clumsy enough I thought he was describing real events) into a more conventional novel in Part 3, which was when it finally improved, but also got kind of derailed.
The premise of the book is that it's set in the Bone Wars, an episode from that period in the Victorian Era when both paleontology and archeology were really being pioneered (paleontology a little later). There were two main paleontologists who were operating in the American Plains, which apparently has a ton of fossils close to the surface (so does Central Asia), and they were douchebags so they spent all their efforts raiding each other, literally shooting to kill, stealing bones in raids, and sometimes smashing each others priceless fossils out of spite. In the novel the douchebaggery is portrayed one-sidedly, which I don't know if that's accurate or not.
From what I've read (just now after finishing it), Crichton is in that camp of authors who churned out a million books and whose talent was writing stuff that's good enough as opposed to be being very high quality.
