• 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.