For The First Time, Again

This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. Check out other bloggers at this week’s post.

Feels Like The First Time

As I try to ease my way back into WWBC posts, I can’t help but notice how many of them are about books, whether something I’ve read or something I want to read. It bothers me more than just a little that I come up so short on the prompts about characters or quotes or what have you. I feel like I haven’t read enough to be able to do those prompts justice, so I just skip them.

I wish I could recall more of and about the books I’ve read over the years, too.

So which books could I read for the first time?

Dinosaurs

Back when I was a security officer at the college in the early 90s, I would occasionally kick back in the office and read for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. I picked up a copy of Jurassic Park at the library one day from their new books section and carried it with me to work.

I’d already seen Michal Crichton’s work on the sliver screen by then, having taken in Looker and Runaway in the 80s, as well as reading the novelization of the original Westworld, so I was a fan even before I knew who he was.

I remember being fascinated with the science in Jurassic Park. DNA was just kind of being spoken about in the mainstream, I think, so it really seemed like cutting-edge tech that someone had sequenced dinosaur DNA and was recreating them. I remember thinking even then that it would be an amazing movie, but I didn’t think the tech was ready for it at the time.

I was wrong, of course. The movie came out just a year or so after I read the book.

That book turned me into a huge Crichton fan though. I burned through Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, Airframe, and Timeline as quickly as I could get my hands on them. At some point, I picked up an omnibus edition of Congo, Sphere, and Eaters of the Dead, though I never finished it.

I know a lot of people call Tom Clancy the father of the techno-thriller, but I think Crichton really deserves the title.

Techno-Thrillers

Speaking of Clancy…

I’ve got two favorite Tom Clancy books that fall under this idea of reading something again for the first time.

I think I read Red Storm Rising first, though I wouldn’t swear to it. It makes sense though, because in the mid-80s, I was going through a big TEOTWAWKI phase in my reading, and that included a lot of military fiction. Around the same time, I was also interested in military board games, including Harpoon, which Clancy and Larry Bond used to game out the climactic battle in The Hunt for Red October between the Red October and the Konovalov.

I thought early on that RSR also be a tremendous movie and still think so. It might hit a little too close to home these days, and it’s a huge sweeping story, so maybe a long mini-series would be better.

The book just absolutely gripped me, all the way through. The heroics of LT Edwards and Sergeant Smith as they play hide-and-seek with the invading Soviet forces on Iceland. The almost crippling self-doubt of Edward Morris after his first ship is shot out from under him. I’ve re-read it several times over the years, but reading it again for the first time would be an interesting experience.

Likewise, The Hunt for Red October was a terrific introduction to the “Ryan-verse,” or the world Clancy created around Jack Ryan. I loved that there so many references to things that happened before the story (and that so many of those fit so well into the later Patriot Games).

Then Again

One of my other favorite authors is Robert B. Parker, he of the Spenser and Jesse Stone books. I couldn’t tell you which one introduced me to the series. I’m sure I watched “Spenser: For Hire” long before I read any of the books. It’s likely I didn’t even know about the books when I was watching the show, even though the opening credits said “Based on characters created by Robert B. Parker.”

I think I’d just like to read them all again for the first time. I know after watching the show, I can only see Robert Urich as Spenser and Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone.

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