Sphere

My latest book from the library is Sphere by Michael Crichton ...

In the middle of the South Pacific, a thousand feet below the surface, a huge vessel is unearthed. Rushed to the scene is a team of American scientists who descend together into the depths to investigate the astonishing discovery. What they find defies their imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical explanation. It is a spaceship, but apparently it is undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be at least three hundred years old, containing a terrifying and destructive force that must be controlled at all costs.

There was a not very good movie adapted from the story, but I've never read the book, so when my sister recently told me one can check out kindle library books at Amazon, I decided to try it with Sphere. So far, it's interesting enough. Here's the beginning of a past review of it in the NYT ...

ANYBODY HOME?

MICHAEL CRICHTON'S new novel, ''Sphere,'' kept me happy for two hours sitting in a grounded plane while the mechanics or whatever they were tried to decide whether the plane would ever fly again. The answer came up no, whereupon ''Sphere'' continued to keep me happy for another half an hour, standing in line to have my ticket rerouted. No one can ask more of a thriller, except maybe that it be a little longer; this one ran out sometime before my involuntary tour of the major airports of the United States.

Norman Johnson is a psychologist who is occasionally called in by the Federal Aviation Administration to help survivors of plane crashes cope with shock and trauma. He receives a mysterious call from the military and is whisked away to a bit of Pacific Ocean very far from anything, where a number of United States Navy and oceanographic ships are collected. It's not a plane crash this time - or not exactly ....