Dinosaurs Will Die

It's backblip o'clock. This weekend has been a busy one for me, as bank holiday weekends often are, so between work and friends visiting, time for taking pictures and blipping them has been scarce.

Either way, Saturday's blip is a bit of a shout-out to the late Michael Crichton, to whom I feel greatly indebted. His novel Jurassic Park was probably the first "adult's" book I read, back at the age of twelve, and it inspired me to a lifetime of reading, not to mention writing fiction of my own. Spurred on by the unmatchable sense of adventure that Jurassic Park had given me, I went on to read every book the bloke had written by the time I was thirteen (even the gloriously sex-filled Disclosure, which I managed through various Machiavellian machinations to conceal from my mum's disapproving eye). As with many popular authors, you could find plenty of literary faults in Crichton's writing, but he fully understood something that many of the more high-brow writers tend to forget; as a storyteller, your principle task is to do justice to the story you're telling. To chart a journey that no reader could refuse beforehand, or forget afterwards.

It's such a great novel that I caught Rex here trying to steal it. I thought it best to take a photograph before taking it back off him, just in case the police should need to be notified of Rex's thievery. Still, it's good to know that literary taste isn't completely extinct.