A Love Letter to Jurassic Park

So. I have a confession to make. Although I have a MA in English Literature, my favorite books are often somewhat less than.....academic. So let us talk for a moment about Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, a book that I have destroyed four paperback copies of through numerous re-reads.

I read Jurassic Park for the first time when I was in fourth grade. I was an "advanced reader," and I had a really supportive teacher who occasionally had Silent Reading parties on Fridays. We were welcome to curl up anywhere in the classroom, bring a pillow, blanket, whatever, and just read for the entire day. For a socially-awkward, bookishly-inclined kid, this was pretty much the ideal situation. My jam for nearly all of those silent reading parties was Jurassic Park.

Let's talk about all the reasons why Jurassic Park is the shit:

• Science is cool, kids! The first few times I read this book, I had to do it sitting next to an encyclopedia. I learned how to pronounce "deoxyribonucleic acid" from this book. I learned what an embryo is. I learned more about genetics from Jurassic Park than I learned in AP Biology in high school.
• The kids. Re-reading Jurassic Park as an adult, I have less resonance with this point, but at the time, I was totally enamored of it. Tim and Lexi? They were competent! Lex was a sports nut, and Tim was a proto-hacker! They were complex, well-rounded characters, and it was the first time that I had ever encountered a child that was written in that way. I really loved seeing characters that I could relate to at that age: kids are more complex than most children's or YA lit gives them credit for.
• Heck yeah dinosaurs! There's a great line from Dr. Grant's perspective in this book that talks about how children take power over these giant skeleton fossils in museums by learning to call them by name, like spells or prayers. I had dino-fever as a kid, and although I had mostly outgrown it by the time I was old enough to read this book, Jurassic Park triggered a nostalgia that I didn't yet have a name for. Plus, dinosaurs are cool. Everyone knows that. Speaking of cool....
  

• Ian Malcolm. Now, I'll admit that my love of this character is irrevocably sealed by my love of his hotness characterization in the film. Malcolm's dialogue is one of the best things about Jurassic Park. He was my first snappy comeback regarding whether or not I enjoyed watching sports: "Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud." I mercilessly plagiarized this line in high school persuasive essays. I never got called on it, due to either (inexcusible!) ignorance of Jurassic Park on the part of my teachers, or (understandable) admiration at my mad quoting skillz. I promise that I learned mad citation skillz later in life, Mr. Donde. Malcolm has the bitchiest, sassiest, smartest one-liners, he wore all-black (for efficient heat radiation!), he was a cutting-edge (for the time) mathematician, and he had a thing for Dr. Sattler's legs (which I totally understood a few years later.) I basically wanted to be him between the fourth and eighth grades. And then I wanted to be the Vampire Lestat (definitely more about that later.)