If you thought the movie was great, then wait until you read the book.
The writing is so velvety and yet complex. There were several parts of the book that I read over and over again to appreciate the exquisite usage of language. There were moments when I was so invested in the biologist’s journey that I often felt it was I who was walking through the forests, swamps, and beaches of Area X.
But the bit I loved the most was how the book gave you, the reader, the license to imagine that gorgeous, untouched, verdant landscape inside Area X. But if you thought imagining the usual, the recognizable was fun, then imagining the incredible alienness of Area X made you feel as if you had landed on another planet.
The story is written in the past tense, in a limited third-person narrative, that of a member of Expedition Twelve, the biologist.
Here are some annotations I made in the book. These are mostly just examples of beautiful language usage.
The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise.
So I walked outside, into the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind.
The wind picked up, the darkness intensified. The ever-more distant sound of waves was like eavesdropping on a sinister, whispering conversation. (Brilliant!!!)
But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, and the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all—about nature, about ecosystems.
