• JURASSIC PARK
• by Michael Crichton
• [rated by PBS readers as #52]
• 448 pages
• (yours truly not a huge fan of the movie, but here we go!)

4/18/19

Okay, I have the book but I haven’t even opened it yet. I have to share a new fear first.

While I was at the Barnes & Noble in Santa Rosa picking this book up, I was wandering around, as I have want to do in just about any bookstore. And, for the first time I can ever remember, I wandered over to the sci-fi section. I knew I had to get a couple of books from those shelves for this list, so I was a intrigued to peruse an area I had never hung out in.

I knew I wouldn’t remember most of the titles but I certainly knew Chronicles of Narnia. I thought I was picking up the top book in a stack and then I found out that one book WAS the stack. Makes me realize that I have to keep on trucking, in case I pull a book that takes me a year! Dune was on a shelf nearby and plenty thick too, but this thing was as wide as a piano!

Ah well. I really expect them all to be good books and good writers so I’m game. Well, with the exception of Fifty Shades of Grey, which has to be just about the most confusing title on this list. The only thing I will gain when I read that is shelf space. My sister loaned it to me years ago and there it sits.

But, as usual, I digress!

4/25/19

I don’t want to jinx this book, but I’m about a week in and almost half way through. I am really liking it. Not a page turner yet, but sort of terminally curiosity producing! And even then, I am just entering the page turner phase right now, so I expect to move through it pretty fast.

Wow. For a gal who has no curiosity about dinosaurs, I’m surprised and pleased with how much I’m into this.

One odd side effect – the occasional dinosaur will show up in my dreams at night. And not because it fits in the theme of the dream at all! Just because all of a sudden, there’s a dinosaur!

Definitely great writing, especially considering all the crap he needs to put in there to set it up and move the story and none of that is boring! It is precisely the stuff that doesn’t make it into a movie and it is probably why I didn’t like the movie as much.

I am a bit lost as to who is who in the control booth right now.There a few too many grizzly doubters who think Hammond is over the top. One can easily lose who is who. I also find it fairly far fetched in the plot that hundreds of people have been working on this and the secret hasn’t gotten out.

But – fairness check to stick in here. I am an unabashed Bond fan and all the evil geniuses end up having carloads of guys quietly helping them blow up the world with no questions asked. So I have to give that quibble a pass.

And these are small things. The main thrust pulls you in and slowly portends that things aren’t going to go all that well there!

I love the place being portrayed as state of the art and yet the botanist notices they have mistakenly decorated with poisonous ferns! Great stuff…

4/29/19

Feel like I need to put this one little thought in, not related specifically to Jurassic.

Jurassic is going great, by the way. I am having fun with turning pages and absorbing it all while the dinosaurs slowly eat up the cast of characters.

But my side point is that, in turning 60, I wonder if books can be read really efficiently anymore. When you are young and it’s a good book, you read it straight through, which is precisely the way a good book is meant to be read! Now in my life, a dinosaur eats somebody and I go off to six different functions in three days and when I sit back down to read it, I feel like it’s been a year since the last smorgasbord!

No real question and no real answer. I know that, in 100 books read, I will not have the excitement of discovering something brand new. These books have all been well discovered. Maybe discovery has always been an illusion anyway… But I’d like to think that somewhere in here, I am going to let myself drop deeply into a book, with no interruptions. I drop in now, all the time.

But I’d like to drop in deeper.

5/4/19

Well, I finished it! I must say it more than kept my interest the whole way through.

Crichton has a definite and amazing set of skills. His story has great structure. You find your mind staying up with the premise and there is plenty of exposition to keep you believing at least in the concept of the thing.

I admired two things the most about his writing. I liked the way that he was able to move with ease between so many different points of view. He jumped from story to story and you quickly moved into the new person’s point of view, allowing the suspense to grow exponentially. For instance, when several people are talking together and have no idea that their brethren are out there being munched up by the dinosaurs. Great way to build the storyline – and always by those who are not the wiser yet!

I also think that he writes fabulous dinosaur attacks. I marveled at how they were all surprising, even when you were expecting one. It would literally leap off the page at you. The big scare point was always shocking.

Malcolm and his lectures on mathematics were a bit tedious. I found it crafty and a good solution to have him dying throughout, so that all the others were forced to hear his rants. But they were still rants and got a bit heavy handed, especially from someone who was supposedly getting more light headed by the minute.

All in all, a great read and I’m the richer for having read it. Now if I could just move on from the dinosaurs! So now I will pick.

I picked an interesting bunch. The three titles I came up with are two for younger readers – Ghost & Little Women, while Coldest Winter Ever is a whole other thing! I have decided that I would like to read them all next, so once again tomorrow, I will set off on finding out what my local bookstore has and then the Barnes & Nobel a bit farther away. I’ll get whatever I can and decide then.

Hi. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry I’ve dropped the ball and that this is the first new book listed in weeks. Life has been really busy! But I am keeping up with the reading, currently reading something that is over 950 pages! Help!

But I’m off this week, so I will follow this one up with the next and hopefully catch up with you all and with me! Thanks for your interest.

Cynthia

• THE LOVELY BONES

• by Alice Sebold
• [rated by PBS readers as #69!!]
• 328 pages

Possibly because the Alex Cross mystery I just finished reading felt like such a guilty pleasure, when I pulled this title, I thought I was ready for it. You know, time to get deep for this blonde!

I had heard the premise – that the main character was dead and she was the one telling the story. But nothing  could really make anyone be ready for something like this.

The tone she sets from the first page is an amazing one. There is a pure river of heart running through the family stories, yet there is never too much time elapsed between grizzly details, shocking you freshly each time. So you are drawn into the story and its details, repulsed and then, to your true amazement, you are ultimately charmed by the voice of this girl and her sweetness. Man.

From the first page, I felt a part of this tale. When I’m not reading it, I’m drawn to it, which is the mark of a great story. Then, just before picking it up, the overall story gives me the creeps. But not creepy enough to delay reading it, after which you are again reconnected.

The cover has a few quotes that say that Lovely Bones reminds them of To Kill A Mockingbird. I can see that. The sparse, elegant writing, for one. The lovely and not overwritten characters.

At 70 pages in, I have a few quibbles. The depiction of heaven is almost without detail. I hope the author will round that out a bit. And the narrator, unlike Scout in Mockingbird, seems incredibly erudite for a girl just becoming a teenager. But these are small quibbles. And there is too far to go to think that things won’t take twists and turns before we’re through.

Oh, one other sweet story about getting the book in the first place. Whenever I pick the next title, I call my neighborhood bookstore called Readers and ask if they have it. They so far haven’t (except for the first one, Outlander). They can order it. I don’t want to wait that long. I can take forever to read these but the second I’m done and pick another title, I want that book in my hands!

I then call my local library to see if they have it. They don’t. They can order it. I don’t want to wait that long. So my next place is a very large Barnes & Noble in Santa Rosa. So far, they’ve had them all. So I pack up my dog, Poppy, and take a ride.

This time, my local store had a used copy of Lovely Bones. I said I wanted it and to please hold it. I went to buy it.

It has this lovely bit written in the front of it, from Luke to Maria. It has love in it and high respect – perhaps a teacher of his? Or a reader he wanted to give something special to?

At any rate, I am thoroughly charmed by it and the chance to read Luke & Maria’s copy of it.

4/16/19

I really want out of this one. You might even call it my first crisis book.

Not that big a crisis, I’ll grant you. I’ll get there.

When this book started, the notion of this little girl dying and narrating the book from heaven, watching everyone suffer and try to solve her murder and their own lives in the process, seemed revolutionary in terms of point of view. And it was an amazing beginning. When I write, beginnings are always the hardest so that was one world class opening.

But then, heaven didn’t become anything. How do you put some one in heaven and not have it become anything? The supposition is put in there that in heaven, you will move on as soon as you can let go of the world. That seems a bit tidy. It makes for a whole lot of her just viewing the world.

Wouldn’t she make friends up there? In this book, they say that you get whatever you can imagine in this heaven, but if you can’t connect with people, what’s the point in, say, imagining and concocting your own ferris wheel for instance? Just to ride around by yourself?

Then, though the author writes in ways that keep suspense in there, for the most part, I’m 50 pages from the end and feel in no hurry to complete it. That close to the end, that isn’t a good sign.

The feeling of quality and intrigue I felt at the beginning were genuine. But have they paid off? Not really. Not yet.

I can see where people who have certain feelings about death would like to think that their departed loved ones just sit on the other side and watch our every move. But that feels really stalemate-like to me.

This is obviously a book that others love. I buy that. It is really possible that my problems with it are mine. The writing is very good.

And who knows? Maybe the end will justify the means.

Stay tuned.

4/17/19

Well, I finished it. Need to collect my thoughts…

The ending definitely made up for the lull I went through in the middle. If anything, there was almost a rush to solve and end everything throughout the book.

The last 50 pages were written extremely well. Might even be the most complex, most detailed and most visual portion of the whole opus.

I’m somewhat interested in how much of this stays with me. If there had been more about heaven, the whole book would have been more interesting to me. But by the end, I finally got what made this a lasting read for so many.

I’m going to finish a few other books and see what of this, if anything, lingers, but you might know by now that I can’t wait to know what the next book will be!

Oh my God. Jurassic Park.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, especially when the dinosaurs could unlock freezers and stuff by the end. But I read a bunch of reviews on amazon and those people emboldened me. They each said that the book is better than the movie and that Crichton’s writing has them reading more and more of his books. I think the fact that he is as versatile as he is and has written on a lot of subjects quells my fears that it will be too dinosaur-y.

We’ll see!