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The Reader – Welcome to Jurassic Park

In the summer of ‘93, four words changed my life. Welcome to Jurassic Park . . .

I was just returning from The Summit and my high school choir’s annual performance at our graduation ceremony. As we were picking up our things to go home, I noticed one of my classmates holding a book by Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park.

“Wait, Jurassic Park is a book?!” Like many teenage boys, I was excited about summer’s most anticipated blockbuster, Jurassic Park, but I had no idea it was based on an actual book.

At the end of my sophomore year in high school, my reading was limted to the required English class reading and textbooks. I was most definitely not what you would call an avid reader.

There’s early in the movie where they feed the velociraptors.

That poor cow in the video was Jurassic Park the book in my hungry hands. I tore threw it like a raptor, and started grabbing every Michael Crichton book I could get my hands on. Congo, Sphere, Terminal Man, Eaters of the Dead, I read them all. It also didn’t hurt Crichton had another book, Rising Sun, coming to theaters that summer too.

While Michael Crichton got the rivers to run, it was another author hitting the silver screen that same summer that broke the dam. John Grisham was taking over theaters himself with The Firm and Pelican Brief, starring Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.

My dad marvels about it to this day. Something broke loose inside me, and my life changed forever. However, there were only so many Crichton and Grisham books available. Once those ran out, this hunter had to find a new source of Prey.