Not so novel

They're old. They're boring. They're repetitive. I'm not talking about the political parties of India, although they fit the description very well. I'm talking about the new age "novels" that are written today. The spy thrillers, espionage filled action adventures that are churned out by the minute by writers like Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy. Let's face it. Their early books were good. But after a point, they just started writing about the same thing over and over again. I mean, seriously, how many times can you read about the rugged, quiet hero, who has a great body but is still a sensitive man inside with feelings, an anti-hero type person who can do no wrong that cannot be justified by his own twisted view of the world.

I'm sick of reading about this super-spy who has a dark, shady and romantic past as well as a bright, sunny and romantic future. Tom Clancy will never stop writing bullshit book after bullshit book about world wide conspiracies involving overly high tech equipment at the disposal of an ultra super secret task force under the direct control of the president. They'd obviously be led by a man who can call in "favours" from anyone under the sun, some grizzled war veteran who is covertly sympathetic towards our unique anti-hero. Bah!

I read Dan Brown's A & D, as well as the DaVinci Code. I liked both. Screw the critics who said that the "prose" was too boring, and the text was not descriptive. Who cares? The book entertained and thats all we needed from it. In fact, thats all we expected from it. If we wanted to read excellent prose, we'd all read Shakespeare. On the contrary, Digital Fortress was a piece of crap, which just goes to show that no author can ever churn out hit after hit.

Nuts to Ludlum and his barrage of books starting with 'The'. He seems to have no dearth of stories, since he releases one book every year it seems. Each and every one of them is exactly the same. In fact, I recollect seeing a Tom Clancy plot generator someplace. I searched for it, and here it is: http://xoaonline.com/tomclancy.html . This probably works for Ludlum too. 'Nuff said.