I picked up Jurassic Park in the beginning of the summer, expecting it to be a fast-paced, quick summer read.  Your typical “beach/airplane” book.  I carried it with me all over town and perhaps the most amusing anecdote I can tell you is that when I was reading it in Chelsea Market, a guy who I must describe as a “skateboard bum” approached me and smiled and started to initiate friendly conversation by remarking that he “didn’t know they’d made the movie into a book.”  Sigh. 

For those of you expecting the book experience to be like the movie at all, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Oh yes.  For the first, oh, say, half of the book, nothing much happens.  Nothing…much…at all.  In fact, it takes several chapters of bouncing around between incidents before we even meet any of the main characters!  This book suffers from too much “prologue” and then chapter after chapter of science jargon and then FINALLY, dinosaurs.

Here’s where I will agree with the “skateboard bum:” normally, I sing the refrain “the book is always better!”  but in this case, I think the movie wins out as being more of the fast-paced, action-packed entertainment that I was hoping for all along.

Throw me to the raptors.  The movie was better.