ted's book nook

• author: Michael Crichton
• genre: science-fiction, thriller
• pages: 448

All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they’ll tell you will be wrong.

Small fact about me: Jurassic Park is one of my favourite movies of all time, and I also happen to love the book quite a lot as well. I’ve seen the film version of The Lost World a dozen times, but until now I have never picked up the book. Having read it now, I think it’s safe to say that I don’t love it to the extent that I love the first book.

The main issue I had was the pacing. I enjoyed the philosophising and discussion of evolution and so on, but there seemed to be a severe lack of plot progression that was starting to bother me. It takes a good old slog before anything significant really happens. Because it takes so long to get to the meat of the story, a lot of the tension and horror that makes Jurassic Park so good is completely absent. Sarah Harding also did a lot of heavy lifting in this book, she’s pretty badass.

I also noticed that it seemed to follow a lot of beats from the first book. Evil man trying to make money from the dinosaurs, Ian Malcolm gets injured in the second half and doesn’t have much to do or say after the fact, two children that happen to be brilliant enough to hack into computers.

That being said, there are some super cool moments with the dinosaurs, and the carnotaurs rock. Just nothing as horrifying as Jurassic Park.