I loved this. I somehow ended up reading this at the same time as I was watching The Miniature Wife, so it was very much all about small things. It’s like a cross between Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Jurassic Park, and just a really good adventure. Some of it is more believable than other bits, but as an action adventure thriller, it’s great and has a lot of Crichton’s signature elements - great science, interesting characters, a perilous journey, and a lot of moral questions. I can already picture the film adaptation.

I’m always wary of these posthumous Michael Crichton books, but this one seemed to be pretty credible and was helped by the hand of James Patterson, who isn’t always my cup of tea, but definitely knows how to help tease out a story from existing material. I did enjoy the book, the tension is fierce, the action frantic, and it’s always more difficult when you’re enemy is mother nature. There are areas that don’t feel fully fleshed out, and you can tell this isn’t entirely MC’s work, but ultimately it’s a really good thriller that is more than worth a read.

This feels like a slightly unusual topic for Michael Crichton to write about, given how his most famous works are technological and political thrillers. But I can see why it captivated him enough to put pen to paper - the story behind it is almost like a movie unfolding. The characters are intriguing, the plotting intricate, the pick-pocketing and preparations are excellent and the unfolding of the robbery beset with problems to overcome. Then there’s the trial and all that follows. It’s really a great story, even if the actual haul wasn’t necessarily worth all the effort! And the re-telling in this is great, written in a really engaging style with plenty of context given for why certain attitudes were taken at that time. Loved it.

A few of the John Lange/Michael Crichton books I’ve read recently have been a bit hard to get into because there have been a lot of characters and threads that need to pull together before you get an idea of what’s going on. This one is a bit more linear, focusing on the investigation into a potential terrorist threat, and you get the jigsaw puzzle pieces at the same time as the detectives, before learning what is going down. It’s great, and this one really felt like it had that technological element that made Crichton so successful later down the line. I loved it.

This was an interesting Michael Crichton pulp fiction thriller, again it took a while to get into because there were quite a lot of characters to keep track of. But the mistaken identity part of it was captivating, the way our hero went along with things thinking they were just slightly weird but actually were a part of this much bigger plot. A lot of fun.

It took me far too long to get into this, there were too many characters initially and we were chopping between them too quickly. But once the pieces were gathered together and the heist story started emerging, then it was really fun, particularly the twist where the safe was empty! The banana obsessed Mrs Shaw was a suspicious character from the beginning but still quite a lot of fun to see how it all played out.

This took a minute to get into, as a random doctor ends up getting caught in an escalating plot. He, and we, are never really sure what is going on even right to the end. But the twists and turns are always fun to read, and wow the bird attacks at the end were absolutely terrifying. It’s a quick read, and I wouldn’t say it was one of his best, even in this sub-genre of pulp fiction, but always worth a read!

Michael Crichton’s early thrillers are super quick and easy reads which go down very well, and although they may not have been his proudest moments, I still really enjoyed them. This one was focused on tomb robbing in Egypt, so had some interesting ideas about the legality and ethical behaviours within. There were some heart-stopping moments, too, when he got trapped in the tomb, oof. I couldn’t see how this story was going to come to a satisfying ending but of course, I should have trusted in the author as it was a fantastic read with a great finale.

Another of Michael Crichton’s books that was written before he was the thriller writer we know and love, this one follows a doctor who gets involved in a pharmaceutical horror of surprisingly epic proportions. I’m not totally sure of the ending here, or if there was a point trying to be made, but I really enjoyed it up until then. It was so well written, engaging and with fascinating ideas. The hotel made up almost entirely of drugs and the art of suggestion is so intriguing. Awful but captivating in equal measure!

The intro to this by Crichton’s widow says she is glad that these books are now available to read widely under his original name, as they put Michael through medical school and set him on the path to the accomplished thriller writer that we know and love. That’s not to say he was proud of these books necessarily, they’re self-confessed pulp fiction, airport adventure books, but I loved this one. It’s just straight to the action, no real character development, but even with that you somehow love all the good guys regardless. A quick, fun read!

I must have read this before, because I’ve mentioned it before on this site, but I didn’t remember it when I started reading again. I listened to the audiobook, read by Scott Brick, and immediately you are drawn into the story as you join Norman on his journey to a mysterious situation in the middle of the ocean. It starts out as a standard sci-fi story but turns into something more psychological and philosophical as it unfolds. Interesting and well told, a good story!

I don’t know if I’ve read this one before or not, I have read a lot of Crichton books but not for a long time. It was interesting how quickly everyone adapted to the world with dinosaurs - particularly compared to the first book where there was a lot of disbelief and explanations required. But it had all the thrills and gore that you expect from a Jurassic Park novel - much better than the film that bears its name!

It’s so good. Brutal, and terrifying, hitting harder than the film does and delving deeper into the chaos theory that Malcolm expands on to the point where you are sort of left wondering if you have any control over anything.

I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed this one before because I first read it a long, long time ago and have dived back into it a handful of times since. It’s one of those long standing favourites, a bit of comfort reading when you’re not ready for something new. Michael Crichton is a firm favourite of mine, and this being a time travel book, it’s bound to be up there with the best. I love the writing, that it starts out quite sedately albeit with the intriguing mystery, and gradually ramping up as things get hectic and time gets tight.

Oof, loved it! How have I not seen this before? So many elements add up to making this a Christine-favourite film. Jan de Bont of Speed fame. Written by the amazing Michael Crichton. Incredible cast (that we spent the entire time going ’that’s the one from this film… but younger.’) and most of all a great story.

It’s actually better than I remember, there’s plenty of fun dialogue to be had with Ian Malcolm around. It’s very predictable in places, and it does go a bit odd at the end with the dinosaur rampaging around the city. There’s talk of scenes being cut which explain why everyone on the boat was killed but the dinosaur was still trapped… it would have been good for them to keep some kind of explanation in about that!

Mm, it was just as good as I remember. Amazingly, it hasn’t aged particularly badly - just the computers, as always. The dinosaurs still look amazing. Something I hadn’t noticed in previous viewings was the overuse of a camera zooming into someone’s face just before they would say something really important, or drop a one-liner like they do. ‘Mr Hammond, I believe the phones are working.’ Etc, etc. It didn’t really detract from it, though, I love the film, I love the music, and it makes me want to re-read the book too.

As their Book of the Week recently, the iBookstore featured the new Michael Crichton novel called Micro. Except, it’s not really a fully baked Crichton book. I’m a massive Michael fan, Timeline is one of my favourite books of all time. Some of his later works turned out to be a bit hard work, but Jurassic Park, Congo and Sphere are all great pieces. I was very sad when he died and paid tribute to his back catalogue, before finding a new book of his - Pirate Latitudes. This one was practically finished and just had yet to be published before he died, so although I felt a bit weird reading it, it was understandable.

The story is good, although I always worry when a book starts with a long list of characters, setting up the group for the rest of the pages. I am always concerned I’ll never remember them all, but of course, a good writer makes that problem go away, as Crichton inevitably does. It feels like one of those books you never really get too involved with, as it just follows the events as they happen, thus making it a page turner without you being emotionally invested.

Michael Crichton died yesterday, and I don’t think I’d be lying if I said he was my favourite author of all time. I didn’t even know he was ill, which is so unusual in this day and age that it makes me like him even more. Obviously the usual applies, with thoughts and feelings going out to his family, but on a purely selfish level, I’m sad that there will be no more books. Every novel I picked up I thought was going to be a nightmare to read, with so many scientific, technological, and futuristic plots. But Crichton has a way of making the complex understandable and from that it becomes enjoyable.

One big problem I had with this book was the sheer number of characters. It started off quite simply with just the narrator and his family, and the accused and their family. Then there was a victim and that family, three hospitals, doctors, scientists, police, reporters, friends, relations and goodness knows who else. By about halfway through I was getting very confused.

A space probe falls out of orbit and crashes to earth, way off from the designated site. There appears to be a new form of bacteria on it, and when a team of scientists go to investigate, they find this is going to be far more than they bargained for. A national disaster could be in the making. You don’t really get much chance to draw breath and get to know the characters involved in this story, which is probably good because you’re never sure who is going to survive and there’s far too much else happening to spend a lot of time on someone’s back story.

The writing felt different to any other book I have read before, but I don’t know if it is a style known to crime stories. It’s told as though you were relating the story to a friend, although with far more detail. Crichton is a master at setting the scene and giving enough background information to aid understanding but not so much you fall asleep. There’s a lot of Victorian ‘crime-speak’ and whilst some of the sentences are translated for you, sometimes it’s just left for you to get the drift of what’s going on. Nevertheless, it’s a great tale, told well, with characters as large as the crime itself.

Although not a day to be curled up inside, I felt like watching some films. I thought instead of wasting the weather, I could manoeuvre the television and sit in the sunlight. Now, you should all know that I’m quite a big Queen fan, if not you obviously haven’t been reading this journal for very long. I was recommended to watch Highlander, the film which ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, my favourite song ever, is famous for. When I was in the video shop last, I could only think of Braveheart, which I was informed at a rather loud volume later, was completely different. So, today, I picked up Highlander (the guy from Holby City’s in it!!) and also Timeline.