Jurassic Park

So they were so focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.

Jurassic Park defined my childhood and introduced me to Michael Crichton. I was an avid reader of all of Crichton's works and followed him to TV and movies. The impact this story had on my life cannot be overstated.

The cover for my 25th anniversary Kindle version of this book says "read the book that started it all" and that's true in more ways than one for me and millions of others around the world. This story is iconic.

I love Spielberg's adaptation and watched it as nearly many times as I watched Tremors. Unfortunately the book hasn't received the same airtime and I was happy to correct that with this re-read. I would have read the book several times in the 90's, to the point where the paperback copy I own needed to be taped together to hold its form. Twenty years later I am going back to a classic and enjoying the similarities, and differences, between the print and movie forms.

Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet-or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.

I was surprised how scary the book is. I did not remember that level of dismemberment and death from my original reads, so either I suppressed those horrors or just plain forgot. Whatever the reason, the book is rated R while the movie dabbles in light PG-13.

I enjoy re-reading Lord of the Rings because I can see the movies play out in my head, and I loved that aspect with Jurassic Park. And when there is a deviation or different character from the movie adaptation, it felt exciting because I didn't know what was going to happen next. I agree with all of the modifications Spielberg did to the source material and I'm glad Cricthon's story will stay as the OG that was grittier and more destruction.

It's unfair to rate this book because I love it. Any flaws that may exist or with characters (Lex Murphy, please head this way to the Velociraptor paddock for their midday snack, please and thank you) I will overlook. I am biased on the book and it gets a pass on everything, and it deserves five stars for its significance in my life and others around the world.

So, I know I read this the year the movie came out, but that was too long ago to remember just about anything from it - not to mention I was far younger, so I don't know how much I truly understood with it. Fast forward 25 years and I listened to the audiobook...

Well, yeah, the movie is better. Now, I get I might have a huge bias in that since I've watched the movie plenty of times over the past 2o something years and never reread the book every again until this week, but still, I will take the movie over the book. First of all, it felt like all the characters except for Grant, Tim and Malcolm were utterly stupid. Clearly a movie is going to make changes from a book as we all know, but the movie improved Hammond and Statler and the kids considerably. Where the book was better was obviously it can go into far more explanations about genetic engineering, or dinosaurs in general, or Malcolm's chaos theory explanations. It also had a better Gennero and to some extent Henry Wu.

As for the audiobook itself, it was unabridged (yes!), and the narrator was tolerable, but not the greatest. So, all in all, glad I listened to it to get the original story, but yeah, I'll still with the movie.

I last read this sometime around 1993 or 1994, as far as I can remember, when I was much younger, I didn't understand many of the concepts in the book. At the time, the book seemed a thriller that was a result of human hubris. And it still stands, but the hubris really stands out, now that I understand what Ian Malcom is talking about when he discusses the expected population curves on the island.

I was most interested that while Crichton captured the hubris of Palo Alto and companies nearby very well, that the valley developed toward advertising, social networks, and tracking each person's preferences over genetically engineering pets and consumer goods. I'm not sure which I'd rather have – both are a result of doing something because we can, not because we should. Perhaps that is our doom, we tend to want to push the big red button to see what it does, before understanding what it is for.

Given the technology mentioned in the book, overall the story still stands well for the time it was written. In many ways, it is a little scary, knowing just how large we've build data centers, and what generally they're capable of doing. If the folks in Silicon Valley, or that own any of these large data centers, ever decided to try to bend genetics to their will, I'm afraid that something similar to Jurassic Park could occur.

That all aside, I enjoyed Jurassic Park as a quick-paced read, that is hard to put down once the action starts. He may not have written literature, Crichton certainly could write a well-paced thriller. I don't know that I'll revisit this book again (maybe in another 24 or 25 years), but if I do, I hope it won't be similar to today's events and folks reading The Handmaid's Tale or 1984.