Paul's Ponderings

Finally finished with Jason Bourne

I finally finished reading Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Ultimatum. I wish I could say that I enjoyed this one. I found all three of the Bourne series at a used book sale in their original hard cover versions and picked them up pretty cheaply. I started reading The Bourne Identity first of course, and really enjoyed it. Sure didn't really match up with the movie version, but you could tell that it was from the same book. The biggest significant different was the Jason Bourne's target, but that is to be expected considering that there is something like twenty years difference between the book's action and the movie's action. The second book in the series is The Bourne Supremacy, which is also a pretty good book. That one took me a little bit longer to get through, but was still pretty enjoyable. It too has been made into a movie, but aside from a few characters it really has nothing at all to do with the book. I suppose the producers in Hollywood wanted something a bit more in line with their first movie, and since the book deals with Bourne's history from the first book, which was completely re-written and destroyed in the first movie, they needed to come up with something else.

That brings me back to The Bourne Ultimatum. I don't know if I was just getting a bit burned out on the genre (I usually don't read espionage novels), or if this one was just that much worse than the other two, but this took me a LOT longer to get through than the first two. It once again deals with the target from the first book, so whatever Hollywood is doing with this version, I would guess that it once again is going to actually have very little to do with the book. Unless they really botch it, its one of those times that I would recommend watching the movie instead of reading the book. If you've already read the first two books, this third one does at least bring it to a conclusion.