Wednesday, February 07, 2007

THE NAME IS DON, SHELDON

Last week one of the greatest ever novelists passed away and this post is to pay my last respects to a prolific storyteller and one of my favorite authors.
There was a poll in the TOI on the next day after his death. I was quite surprised to see the 5 books, TOI thought were the best:
1. Rage of Angels
2. Sands of Time
3. Master of the Game
4. The Naked Face
5. Dont remember the name.

For all I know, these were by no means the best books by Sheldon. Not to sound immodest, but either my knowledge of fiction is poor, or TOI (times of india) has a crappy taste....How could they have missed out bestsellers like Windmills of the Gods (which created Angel - the best assasin in the whole wide world), or If Tomorrow Comes (Forgot the name of the protagonist, but she was one helluva con), or The Doomsday Conspiracy(My favorite and till date I consider many other books to be based with a similar storyline...IceStation(Matthew Reilly) and DigitalFortress(Dan Brown) included), or Tell Me Your Dreams(a tale well spun around Multiple Personality Disorder) or the GOD book - The Other Side of Midnight and it's GOD sequel - Memories of Midnight (I'm sure the character of Napolean Chotas would linger in the readers' minds).

I pay my last respects to the man, whose books made me switch from Hardy Boys to serious fiction.
May his soul R.I.P

2 comments:

Hari Krishnan said...

Nice dude. Sheldon was a great author and these TOI guys actually put up a list of his worst books.You forgot 'Sky is falling' which is a continuation of Windmills of the gods.This was his last best novels as 'Are you afraid of the dark' and 'The other side of me' really sucked.

p.s. Tracy Whitney was the protagonist of 'If tomorrow comes'

Bhargav said...

@hari: Couldn't agree with you more on that count.. Are you afraid of the dark and the other side of me really sucked..There was this other book which Akshay aka "tinnona banro"/Anish had given us, do you remember? It was a cheap imitation of Sidney Sheldon...It was as if some one used Sheldon's name to write that book..Do you remember the name of the book?