Jurassic Park

I am a Michael Crichton fan, so it wasn't hard to decide to put this classic on my 2012 reading list. I was first introduced to him the summer before my junior year in high school. My English teacher for the next year gave us a reading list for the summer, which included The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible, and inexplicibly, Crichton's recently published Timeline (I was a junior in 2003, it was released in 1999). Seeing as the rest of our list was classic novels written during or about American history, this one seemed a little out of place. But my friends and I read our books anyway, writing the required 1-page reflection on each one, and brought them to the first day of class like we were told. When we asked our teacher later why it had been required reading, she said something along the lines of "I thought it was a fun book and that you guys would enjoy a break from the heavier stuff." I have to give her credit, she was probably the teacher who influenced me the most when it came to enjoying and analyzing literature. She also introduced us to The Goonies, for which I am forever grateful.

Anyway, after my first brush with Crichton's work then, I scoured my mom's bookshelves for his other novels. I loved his techno-thriller genre mixing and detailed scientific information infused with fiction. Not literary fiction, by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely a fun and engaging read.

You would have thought that by now I'd have seen the movie version of Jurassic Park, but truth is I never have. It came out in 1993 and was a huge hit - but unfortunately I was 7 at the time and way too young to see it. I remember going to California to visit my Aunt and Uncle a few years later and during our trip to the Universal Studios park seeing the dinosaur attraction, but that and clips shown on TV of people running from velociraptors were all I knew about the book before reading it.

The beginning of the novel was positively creepy. Like young dinosaurs sneaking into nurseries and eating newborn babies creepy. I quickly decided not to read it at night (yes, I'm a chicken, I'm aware of this). Dinos eating humans aside, I really enjoyed this novel. It was a fast an interesting read, and fairly believable as far as technology and cloning goes (man, computers were simple in the early 90s!) I'm pretty sure the first half of the book was entirely made up of foreshadowing, or at least it felt that way. I was able to make a lot of predictions as to what would happen later in the book. (Metal bars on the skylights? All the electricity on the island is controlled by one computer? They accidentally planted poisonous ferns by the pool? Sure, sounds like everything is going to be fine...)

I loved that one of the most informed characters in the story was a nerdy little boy who not only knew how to act around dinosaurs but how to fix the computer. And that almost none of the adults wanted to listen to him. It just goes to show you, kids really do know more about what's going on around them than grown ups give them credit for.

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a good thriller that will keep them on the edge of their seats for a while. The characters weren't developed a lot, but there is plenty of action to make up for it, which is what made it such a great film (not to mention the Steven Spielberg direction and John Williams score). Just don't read or watch it if you're squeamish - there are way too many half-eaten bodies for the weak of stomach.