Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Jurassic Park once again available as an audiobook

It's hard to believe the novel Jurassic Park is now 25 years old. Unfortunately, we're not getting an annotated or illustrated edition of the book to celebrate its anniversary. What we are getting is a new audiobook released to cash in on the premier of next month's Jurassic World.

The unabridged recording of Jurassic Park, read by Scott Brick, is now available through Brilliance Audio and other online audiobook retailers, like Audible. This is a big deal as there hasn't been an unabridged recording of the novel available since its initial release in 1990, making it hard to find. In fact, it has been much easier to find recordings of the book's inferior sequel, The Lost World. Now you can listen to Jurassic Park for only $16, which is pretty cheap compared to the cost of most audiobooks.

I highly recommend reading/listening to Jurassic Park if you haven't already. Don't worry if you've seen the movie a million times: The novel is very different from the film (and also much better).

What other dinosaur-themed works of fiction are available as audiobooks? Well, as already mentioned, the sequel The Lost World has been around for a while. Here are some other novels I found through Audible:
  • Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker: The famous paleontologist's fun novel about a female Utahratpor surviving in the early Cretaceous.
  • Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston: A modern-day thriller about a mysterious T. rex fossil and the secrets it contains about why the dinosaurs went extinct. It suffers from the problem of giving too much information away at the beginning of the story.
  • Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion: The novelization of one of the TV series' more infamous episodes.
  • The Dinosaur Hunter by Homer Hickam: A murder mystery involving paleontology in modern-day Montana.
  • Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear: An unofficial sequel to the original The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I rather enjoy this book, although other people have called it one of Bear's weaker efforts.
  • Dinosaur Park by Hayford Piece: I haven't read this one, but it concerns aliens, time travel, and dinosaurs.
  • Deathbeast by David Gerrold: The well-known science fiction writer turned his attention to dinosaurs in this time travel story that I didn't like, but maybe you will.
  • The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: The first of three novels set on a lost continent of dinosaurs from the creator of Tarzan.
  • The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: There are at least four unabridged readings of this classic dinosaur novel on Audible. There also are two full-cast audio productions.

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