Re: 2001 and 2010
". . . and fought through the book . . . ."
I must concede and agree, though, that the book is tough to get through. The first two times I tried to read it, I couldn't get past Part One!
(In fairness, I was only ten years old the first time. I lacked sufficient patience, and had no idea yet what a mind-blowing payoff lay further into the book.)
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". . . has watched 2001: A Space Odyssey at least 20 times, read the short story once and fought through the book on three occasions, . . . ."
My own stats are remarkably close to those of Mr. Dabbs. I, too, have watched the movie at least 20 times (somewhere after 10 or 12 I started losing count!) and read the novel at least thrice (not counting my first two, aborted attempts). It's possible my reading count now stands at four or even five, but I just don't recall. And I hope to read it at least once more before I die.
I've read "The Sentinel" at least twice, and probably thrice.
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P.S. In every respect in which the novel differs from the short story, the novel is better:
* using the emission of a signal rather than the interruption of an ongoing signal as the sign that "Hey, your tea is ready!";
* burying the object instead of leaving it out in the open, but surrounding it with an intense and unusual magnetic field sure to attract the notice and attention of anyone looking;
* that in conjunction with both the decision to bury the object in an especially geologically stable region of the Moon (so it almost certainly wouldn't ever be pushed to the surface by natural geological forces) and the decision to use exposure to the Sun's light as a trigger
— every detail in the novel pertaining to the alien object on the Moon not only made perfect sense (and far more sense than the counterpart details of the short story), but represented sheer genius, both on the part of the aliens and on the part of Clarke (or Kubrick?). It was a thoroughly masterful playing of the odds by the aliens, in light of the experiments they had just performed on those apes on the neighboring planet.