Forsyth has all these painstaking steps on everything from faking a passport to making a nuke. The Fourth Protocol has all that as well as a complete org chart of MI5, MI6, the KGB etc etc. Not bad, for all that.
If you want unreadable by those standards, there's always good old James A Michener, whose stories all start off with prehistory (dinosaurs if not stone age men) and end somewhere in the 50s. Trouble is, I like history. I absolutely detest science and maths which is why you won't catch me reading the feynman lectures, brief history of time etc. I find umberto ecos hard to digest but reasonably worth the effort (especially 'Name of a Rose'). Some of his newer ones, like Baudolino, are sad remnants of what was once a great talent (read it after foucaults pendulum and I hope you agree with me. and yes its much better than the mess any lesser author would have made of it). I wont touch ayn rand. And today my tastes run to classic pulp more than anything else (lou cameron's original 'Longarm' westerns under the tabor evans house name, mike shayne / shell scott cop thrillers etc) Sruthi Krishnan [15/06/10 15:16 +0530]:
Usually I get screams of horror when I say this -- I couldn't get through this book The Day of the Jackal by Forsyth. There was this intense detailing on making a gun which was terribly boring, I thought. I remember it well because it was the first book I abandoned without reading fully.
