This has proved to be the best of the three in some ways.  Certainly Clarke looks more deeply at what the humans might be experiencing, feeling, worrying about as they encounter unbelievable events.

Much of the science of the book has to do with Jupiter being converted to a small sun by an exponentially expanding (devouring?) brigade of monoliths.  They suck up the gaseous energy of the planet, and big explosion happens, and suddenly our old familiar galactic neighborhood is a dual-solar system, or at least, is becoming one.

Is this even remotely possible, or at least in a way where all the other planets would survive intact?

However, Clarke had quite the foundation in good astronomical science, so maybe it’s possible.     

Addendum 6/6/06:  2010: Odyssey Two.   I never really wrote about this book; it was interesting, in an abstract way, but not absorbing.  In some sense it’s a mystery story:  What Happened to the Discovery and David Bowman?  What did his last words (Oh my god! it’s full of stars!) mean?  And the book is also a race: will the Chinese, or the Americans recover the data first?

In any case, not as absorbing, but I didn’t want to let the reading of the book lose its place in this reading journal.  So now, it sits in its rightful place in the chronology.