I know that my opinion on this book is affected by the fact that the movie is one of my favorite of all time -it is *impossible* not to compare the book to the movie, especially since I’ve seen it so many times. That being said, I found that the first half of this book was quite exciting and promising, but the second half was glacially slow and boring. I found the stakes to be quite low, the action to be static, and I just didn’t care about the characters as much as I do in the movie. This surprised me because I’ve often enjoyed Crichton’s books, like Next, Congo, among others. I probably won’t be reading this again when, in one of those very rare instances, the movie did it better.