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You're Right, Meg Sucks
Response to Book Review: Meg
{Author's name withheld by request. Letter reprinted with permission.)
Dear Dan,
In response to your August 98 review of Meg, I heartily agree with you.
First of all, I didn't know what Meg was about until I saw its sequel, "The Trench," in an airport book store. Then I realized I had seen the paperback edition of Meg before, but from the cover I had passed it off as some novel about computers (megabyte?).
I think sharks are interesting, so I checked Meg out from the local library. I couldn't believe how bad it was. I got only halfway through (which isn't much, since the novel seems to be triple-spaced anyway) before I couldn't read anymore. I returned it the next day, unfinished (and it's gonna stay that way).
The biggest problem I had with Meg was not the characters (I experience that kind of shallowness with Crichton). It was not the premise (it is fiction after all, so I am willing to give credence to a 60-foot shark in the Mariana Trench). It was the plot. Just mindless action scene after action scene. The shark eating this, the shark eating that. There are only so many shark attacks I can take before I say, "All right, this is ridiculous." It's like in Jurassic Park if all you had was the T-Rex destroying a car, then the Rex eating a herd of dinosaurs, then the Rex going after a human, then the Rex attacking another thing . . . I must complain a bit about the title character, Jonas-something. After 200 pages all I know about him is that he's a muscular paleontologist. He's as shallow as a toddler's wading pool.
Have you ever gone to Amazon.com and seen the readers' reviews for Meg? They praise it like it's the best book in the world. I don't know what they see in it that I don't.
If Disney does decide to turn Meg into a movie (God help us), then they'd better do at least ten years worth of rewriting. But I've been hearing rumors that Disney didn't renew the film rights to Meg after months of bad scripts and the failure of Godzilla. All the better. And Deep Blue Sea doesn't seem to be doing too hot either, so studios might be reluctant to greenlight anymore shark flicks.
It feels good to get this off my chest. I know "The Trench" is one book I'm not going to read. Hooray that I found someone else who thinks that Meg is simply Alten-asinine.
--Reader who wasted half a day on the "Jurassic Shark"
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