From the Bookshelf: Eaters of the Dead

All too often these days I think "I should read more prose fiction" only to seize up between the likely-false dichotomy of supposing anything that would qualify as "respectable literature" would just go over my head even as I sweat and struggle to get through it and then thinking many other things "beneath my talents." Not that long ago, though, in the closest used book store (but just about the only one left open in my city) I saw a slim volume lying on the tile floor next to a full-up bookshelf and picked it up. Books by Michael Crichton do seem to fall into the second category I've just alluded to, such that I've long just slid by them. I did read Jurassic Park back in high school before the movie arrived, but I seemed to find the way he'd presented chaos theory "bleak" and wound up somewhat unenthused (and then liked the movie at the time better in part for brushing past the subject). With the novels he wrote afterwards, I was a bit ready to believe certain critical comments about their spins on controversial subjects comforting the already comfortable without actually reading them myself. Eaters of the Dead had been written years before any of that, though, and I suppose a story purporting to be a translated manuscript from an Arab courtier who just happens to be pulled into a band of Vikings travelling back north to ultimately face "a terror that comes under cover of night" was at least amusing to consider. I wound up buying the book.
( A possibly late realisation )