Gave up on Fall of Giants by Ken Follett. Just too ridiculous with all the characters coincidentally meeting each other and major historical figures. Think Forrest Gump, but taking itself seriously.
I'm in my early 40s, which means that as a precocious reader in my tween and early teen years, there just wasn't much for me to read. Girls had Judy Blume, and boys had Stephen King, which wasn't aimed at us, but was pretty much the closest thing we had to Young Adult fiction.Then one summer my aunt gave me a Ken Follett book. "Triple," about the efforts of a Mossad super-agent to steal the uranium Israel needed to build an A-bomb, without the rest of the world knowing it happened. It was great, for the action and for a couple of harder-than-soft-core-but-not-quite-pron sex scenes that blew my mind. I read all his stuff: Eye of the Needle, Key to Rebecca, and his real-life Iran story "On Wings of Eagles." So I've always had a soft spot for him, and enjoyed Pillars of the Earth when I read it a few years ago.
So when I picked up "Fall of Giants," I was predisposed to find the good in it. About 800 pages later, I was still looking. It was really horrible crap.
On a related note, my other favorite inadvertent Young Adult author was Clive Cussler, whose Dirk Pitt novels (like Follett's) combined action, historical references, and geopolitics with steamy sex scenes. I loved "Raise the Titanic!" as well as the less-renowned "Night Probe!" which had one sex scene I remember bringing to school to share with my seventh grade classmates. It wasn't until much later that I realized novels with exclamation points in their titles maybe weren't necessarily awesome.
You know, in thinking back about these books, I just remembered the other author who completed my youthful Holy Trinity: Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, the Pellucidar series (which started with "At the Earth's Core" and later featured an incredible crossover installment - "Tarzan at the Earth's Core"). I spent summers growing up with my grandparents in their cabin in New Hampshire, and paperback editions of Burroughs novels lined the shelves. Flash forward at least 10 years and I'm a freshman English Lit major at a snobby New England liberal arts college. I walk up to a group of classmates having a discussion about "Burroughs." Astonished that such a group of tweedy self-proclaimed literary intelligentsia are talking animatedly about my boyhood hero, I'm
this close to jumping into the conversation with a comment about Tarzan when I realize they are talking about another "Burroughs," who had written some book called "Naked Lunch."