You may or may not have noticed a couple of new sections on my side bar. There are two of them: “Books I’m Reading” and “Books that are Next”. The section titles should be self explanatory. Though I wouldn’t guarantee that the books that are “next” will for sure be picked up next. They’re just the ones on my shelf that I have my eye on.
One book that I’m reading is one that I read way back in 10th grade while living in Germany, “Jurassic Park”. I remember enjoying it immensely. If you haven’t read it and ever plan to, you may not want to continue reading. But if you don’t care or have seen the movie anyway it probably doesn’t matter.
One of the things that I have remembered about the book from oh so long ago was the opening scene when a helicopter from Isla Nublar flies through a horrible storm to the coast of Costa Rica to have a worker treated for an accident. The foreman says it was a machine accident but the doctor thinks it looks like a mauling.
The Spanish speaking worker, not much more than a boy, says something about a “raptor” a few times. I remember racking my brain to try and translate his words and figure out what they meant. The characters in the book said that what he was saying wasn’t Spanish and that it didn’t make any sense. The english meaning of “raptor” is “bird of prey.” I couldn’t figure it out and never went back to read that part after reading further in the book.
So I started reading the book again recently and what the worker actually says is “La so raptor”. Hmmm, doesn’t that sound like something familiar? Anyone who has seen the movie (which is pretty much everyone, right?) knows what the evilist dinosaur of them all is and which one might have attacked him, right? The Velociraptor. The hint of the craziness of the island was right there on the first page, if only you knew enough about dinosaurs.
I liked dinosaurs a lot when I was a kid. What little boy didn’t? But I had never heard of the Velociraptor before reading this book and seeing the movie. I just looked up some info online about dinosaurs and an interesting thing is that most of the “famous” dinosaurs, like the T. Rex, Triceratops, and the Velociraptor, were all very late dinosaurs. They lived in the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, not the Jurassic period, which was nearly 100 million years earlier.
Anyway, I liked seeing the foreshadowing right there on the first page that I had never known about. I’m looking forward to finding and seeing all sorts of other stuff in the book that I didn’t see before as well.
