Previous Titles
Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton), 10/10
Man, where do I begin with these two? I was 7 years old when Jurassic Park hit theaters. My
nephew took me to see it with him on his 15'th birthday and it's something I'll never forget!
It embarrasses me to think just how long it took me to get around to actually reading the
actual book that Crichton wrote, but I believe it was worth the wait.
If you haven't read Jurassic Park yet, I strongly urge you to do so. You'll find that there are
a lot of differences between the book and the movie. Some of them are striking and some
will just make you scratch your head in confusion, but some of these are caused by the
fact that the movie is completely different from the book.
The Hollywood adaption was obviously watered down so that they could reach a younger
audience, and really, you couldn't expect anything less. Back then, dinosaurs were all the
rage for kids, so they shamelessly cashed in. However, after reading the book and looking
back on the film, it pains me to see what could have been.
The book is action packed and very well paced despite a lot of substance in the form of
chaos theorem and jargon floating about. I just wish I could say the same for the sequel.
The Lost World (Michael Crichton), 6/10
The sequel to Circhton's best seller came out 5 years after JP and 2 years after the movie
had been adapted and released. Just like before, we see a large difference between the
movie and the book itself. The book itself is quite tame compared to it's original. It's slow
in pacing and the book really doesn't get all that interesting until 2/3'rd's of the way in,
which is a REALLY long time given the book is 400+ pages. My favorite part in the book
would have to be when Sarah Harding is chasing a Velociraptor through the jungle in
the middle of the night on a dirt bike, while Kelly is trying to hit it with a dart gun. Tell
me that wouldn't have been epic to see in the movie!?
That aside, I have to sat that the movie is actually better than the book this time around.
Maybe I fucked up diving right into The Lost World after reading Jurassic Park, maybe I
let myself down expecting it to be similar to Jurassic Park, but it just wasn't as good as
the first in my opinion.
Currently Reading
State Of Decay (James Knapp)
What can I say about this thing? I'm not even 1/3'rd of the way into the book and I'm
already a little overwhelmed with what's going on. Is that a bad sign? I'll let the back of
the book tell you the premise of the story:
"They call them revivors-technologically reanimated corpses- and away from the public
eye, they do humanity's dirtiest work. In the near future, where a never-ending war
drones on, they are infantry. Back home, they sustain black-market trade in labor and
pleasure models- (Yea, that's right. We can look forward to zombie prostitutes by 2015
when we head back to the future!)
If Nico Wachalowski never sees another revivor, it'll be too soon. He chose to fight
alongside-and against- them rather than allowing his corpse to later be revived for
military service. But now, back home and working as a field agent for the FBI,
he's sent to bust a smugging ring trafficking revivors for the sex trade. What he finds
isn't just pleasure models, but revivors that are custom made to kill, and a massive
stock pile of weapons. Some one is taking a war to the streets. Nico soon realizes
that the twisted roots to this conspiracy go unfathomably deep-and that there may be
more to revivors than he ever knew."
Judging from that above, you'd think the story would revolve around some John McClaine-
esque character, right? Well only partly so. His story is only one out of six characters that
has thus far been played out to the reader. Its fucking hard to keep track with what the
hell is going on because no sooner does one part start to get good, only to jump to another
fucking character. Some times you don't even notice the change in character until you're
already confused....
The book isn't what I thought it would be, and what that is now I don't know. I'll get back
to you on it.
