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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
Couldn’t put it down, especially the last half.
I’d seen the movie with Sean Connery, which is genuinely great, but had never read the book and hadn’t realised it was by Tom Clancy. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by the writing’s competence. Red October gets a lot of praise from ex-military readers for being uncannily close to the reality of how operations like this actually happen. The natural result is a very high level of detail about weapons, ship activities, and communications—there are way too many acronyms—but I found I could skim these without affecting my understanding of the plot. Clancy’s proliferating viewpoints—one moment you’re at CIA headquarters, the next paragraph you’re on a Russian attack sub, the next you’re on a US aircraft carrier—provide a sense of propulsion and immediacy, but are also head-spinning, and the book is too long because of an unwillingness to cut some of this material from the middle. It’s also very ’80s. Jack Ryan’s quest to source a particular kind of Barbie for his daughter’s Christmas present is played for laughs, women exist only as secretaries, and the entire book is openly propagandistic about American capitalism. That said, it’s just as gripping as the film, and my favourite part—following the sonar operator with superb hearing, Jones, as he chases down the unique sound of the defecting Soviet sub—is just as pleasurable. I’ll never get tired of reading about skilled people being competent.
Really exciting plot, but the amount of military technical information in the first half kinda took the fun out of it
My mother recommended this book to me the summer before I began college. I enjoyed it at the time. It was fast paced, suspenseful and well written. I found the main character engaging and human and because it was a good read, my mother and I continued passing subsequent Clancy novels back and forth, although with each novel he became more and more long winded. After Executive Orders, I stopped reading his material all together.
This book, as good as I bet it really is, was just too technical for me. It almost seemed like a military manual on the different missiles and subs, etc.
Just skim the technical sections if they get to be too much for you. Other than that, this is a thoroughly addictive story. Incredibly well-researched, the plot builds tension at just the right pace, keeping you flipping pages.
This book was alright. It's the first Tom Clancy book that I've read, an d I'm thinking maybe I need to read a more recently written one. Some parts were action-action-packed or funny, but a lot of it was kind of corny.