The Lost World

The Lost World or to most of us known as Jurassic Park II, is the sequel to Jurassic Park, a movie and book that involves dinosaurs and a lot of them.
As it went completely haywire in Jurassic Park, there had to be a sequel to all that mayhem.

The Lost World is actually about a second island in Costa Rica, where they used to grow the dinosaurs before they were put on display in the Recreation Park. When the Park failed, the island was abandoned to the dinosaurs still living there and mum was the word. Handsome fees were paid to anyone involved to keep their mouth shut, Ingen (the company behind Jurassic Park) went bankrupt and for almost a decade the world didn't know about an island filled with dinosaurs.

Oh, there were a few incidents, but nothing the Costa Rican government couldn't handle, which they did tremendously because they didn't want tourism to falter because of a dino island.

And that's were the narration starts again.. 10 years later. Malcolm is still one of the main characters, but mostly in the first part of the novel. He's not so much 'there' when everything becomes exciting and life-threatening. There are other characters, such as Sarah Harding, who seems to be a total badass woman. Dr Levine, an obnoxious paleontologist, whose responsible for the party to be out there. Two kids, who have hitch-hiked along. A few others.
The story was not too bad, I had the idea Michael Crichton wrote the story around his ideas of dinosaur behavior, which is kind of self-gratifying.
Expect a mix of narration, scientific explanation seasoned with a pretty awesome action scene.
I must complement on that.
It's not common to come across an action scene which is so well written it gets the heart pumping. It was almost an actual movie scene and I regret they didn't put that in the movie. It was pretty awesome.

I liked this novel sufficiently to finish it, but not much more than that. I'll end with a warning though, for those out there who think that the novel resembles the movie, you're mistaken. Apart from a few characters and locations, the two take their story in a completely different direction.

Eaters of the Dead

I finally finished this rather thin book.. although its thinness wasn't visible to me because of its e-book format ^^
Still, with a little over a hundred pages it took me some time to finish it. Mostly because I kept favouring the other one I was reading. I have a nifty little light that I can snap onto the cover of a regular book so that my reading at night doesn't interfere with my partner's sleep.

But I prevailed and I can count this among those I finished in 2018 and check off one item of my challenge. Jippiekayee MF!!
Of course, I completely forgot that I had a new one to choose from, my e-book library is crammed to the point of bursting and usually I use goodreads to choose a new one. Now I had to spend 10 minutes of valuable reading time last night to choose one directly from that library. A little mind-numbing and the feeling is like trying to choose one toy from the worlds largest toystore. We have a proverb that sounds in english like Choosing is losing. I felt it very acutely last night.
But I picked one, The Devil and Miss Prym.

But what about Eaters of the dead?
It was an exercise in style by late author Michael Crichton. He explains it at the end, how he tried to pour the famous poem Beowulf into a different kind of approach and how he mixed fact and fiction to create something that feels like he himself knew these men.
The thing about Michael Chrichton, is that he can make up a flimsy story in a very real environment. The stage for his stories are so thoroughly investigated, that you feel the atmosphere almost as if you're watching a movie or visiting that said place.
And it doesn't matter where that stage is.. be it a theme park with dinosaurs, outer space, Jamaica in the 17th century, the Viking era, he has the uncanny ability to make all these settings come alive.
And as I said before, the story taking place in these settings doesn't even have to be so good, it's still believable, maybe even more so because real life isn't strung together with unbelievable events all the time.

Eaters of the dead is about the Viking, loosely based upon Beowulf, with a few well placed references to how history was reviewed when this book was written (1970's). A remarkable exercise, but still not the stuff to keep one awake long enough when reading in bed.

Review of Pirate Latitudes

Author: Michael Crichton
Published in 2009
Thickness: 312 pages
Read in Dutch
Personal rating: 4 stars

In short

The Caribbean, 1665. Port Royal, Jamaica is a cutthroat town of taverns, grog shops, and bawdy houses. For Captain Charles Hunter, there’s a living to be made, and gold in Spanish hands is gold for the taking.
Word in port is that the galleon El Trinidad is awaiting repairs in a nearby, heavily fortified, harbor. Hunter assembles a crew of ruffians to infiltrate the enemy island and commandeer El Trinidad, along with its fortune in gold. The raid is as perilous as the bloodiest tales of island legend and Hunter will lose more than one man before he even sets foot on foreign shores, where dense jungle and the firepower of Spanish infantry stand between him and the treasure . . .
With all the suspense that readers have come to expect from one of the best-loved authors of all time, Pirate Latitudes is an irresistible adventure of swashbuckling pirates in the New World, a classic story of treasure and betrayal. (www.goodreads.com)

My two cents

Pirate Latitudes was a magnificent novel from an author who has astonished and disappointed me. Having written the superb Jurassic Park and the somewhat too technical Prey, Pirate Latitudes is a novel worth having read at least once.

The story revolves around Hunter, a captain whose main target is aiding the British in their constant and intriguing war with Spain.
When news of a ship filled with gold, being stranded at a notorious spanish colonized island, he immediately takes action to take hold of that ship.
Together with a crew whose diversity is unique and dangerous, he undertakes an adventure none would believe if they retold it safely harboured again.
The Kraken, cannibals, a Spanish warship brought down with too little men to command his own ship.. all things seemingly impossible but yet Hunter's experience brings them back to Port Royal where another surprise is waiting for them.

The novel's strong points is mainly in the easiness in which you can visualise everything. The Port Royal harbour, the Cassandra (Hunter's ship), the battles.
This has a lot to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies of the past years but it surely adds another dimension to the novel you wouldn't have otherwise.

I recommend this novel, because of the good story, the fastpaced action and the eye for detail. An actionfilled novel, a great novel for a sunday afternoon in the sun. 

Review of Prey

Author: Michael Crichton
First published in 2002
Thickness: 348 pages
Read in Dutch
Personal rating: 2 stars

High-tech whistle-blower Jack Forman used to specialize in programming computers to solve problems by mimicking the behavior of efficient wild animals--swarming bees or hunting hyena packs, for example. Now he's unemployed and is finally starting to enjoy his new role as stay-at-home dad. All would be domestic bliss if it were not for Jack's suspicions that his wife, who's been behaving strangely and working long hours at the top-secret research labs of Xymos Technology, is having an affair. When he's called in to help with her hush-hush project, it seems like the perfect opportunity to see what his wife's been doing, but Jack quickly finds there's a lot more going on in the lab than an illicit affair. Within hours of his arrival at the remote testing center, Jack discovers his wife's firm has created self-replicating nanotechnology--a literal swarm of microscopic machines. Originally meant to serve as a military eye in the sky, the swarm has now escaped into the environment and is seemingly intent on killing the scientists trapped in the facility. The reader realizes early, however, that Jack, his wife, and fellow scientists have more to fear from the hidden dangers within the lab than from the predators without.
Extract from Goodreads.

Personally this novel couldn't intrigue me. The back of the book definitely gave me hope, otherwise it wouldn't have left the library in my bag, but in the end I think I'm just not smart enough to read this novel. The story seems simple enough, a technologic swarm of microscopic robots that have gone on a killing spree, but the technical mumbo jumbo that comes along with it, is a bit like a foreign language to me. Jibberish. 
Even with a IT-husband, I couldn't get into the momentum of this novel, and I truly tried, because I actually liked Crichton's Jurassic Park and Next. I guess this theme just doesn't do it for me. 
But what I do want to mention is the excellent moral of this story. Even with needing background info to read this story, preferably a degree in computer science, I felt the lesson to be that we humans tend to create something without truly seeing the possible consequences. This has happened in the past, and will surely continue in the future. Crichton's prologue touches a few sore spots in our society in which he is completely right, in my book. 
So, my recommendation is, that if you see this book lying in the store or in the library and you don't feel like you have any feel to programming or nanotechnology, pick it up and read his prologue. That's what matters. May he rest in peace, Michael Crichton was definitely on the dot where technology would and will take us.