Veinte mil leguas de viaje submarino (original 1870; edition 2012)

Vernes undersea adventure is an amazing trip that I've taken many times. Although history has proven his vision to be incorrect on many occasions in this yarn, it is still a mesmerizing odyssey. One of my favorite books. ( )

simplistic, technological, oft-times unbelievable, but still entertaining though long-winded

Have you ever read a book and thought "This reads a lot like someone's fantasy"? I have. In fact, it happens a lot with bad genre books - the more genre specific they are, the more they tend to read like what someone would randomly think about while on the toilet.

Usually this is a bad thing, but with Jules Verne, it is not. In fact, it's the one great thing about him: most of his novels have the contagious energy of a 12-year-old's bathroom ramblings. You can almost listen to him thinking in the background: "I bet I could build a submersible ship. It would totally work. You could get in and out using a floodgate mechanism, and you could make it sink deeper by letting more water into the water deposits. And you could get most of what you needed from sea animals and plants. I could live there for months at a time and no one would ever see me again! That would show'em. But there's still the illumination issue - oh wait, I could install a really big lamp on the bow!!" (dear old Jules was informed enough to sound like a prophet to us modern readers, but of course he couldn't have come up with the sonar. It's sort of endearing actually - picture a long black steel cigar with a big lamp at the front. Awwww.).

Then there are all the other parts. Like when he goes on and on about dozens of fish species and their descriptions, sometimes for pages at a time (there's actually a character whose main function is to blurt out the entire taxonomic classification of each. and. every. one. of. them.). Those aren't that much fun.

Don't get me wrong, Verne still holds a dear place in my bookish heart. But this was really, really painful to get through. ( )

What do I think? Ehm.....

I tried reading this book once when I was much younger. My brother brought it home from the library and I was curious. The Dutch version I did not like. I did not get past the first 100 pages or so and I left Jules Verne alone, never tried a book from him again.

Untill I found that I could not go on and not read a book from him. I choose this one, thinking I might have changed enough over the years to start liking it.

But... I must admit that I still do not like the book. It doesn't matter that I tried it in English now: did not get past the first 50 pages. I give up. It doesn't particularly feel good to do so, but the style, the subject, no it is just not my kind of book.

( )

I think this is the 19th century version of the Discovery Channel, with a bit of plot thrown in here and there.

This must have been a fantastical book when it was first written. In the infancy of submarines and electricity, all of this must have been incredibly far fetched, and it's amazing to me how much is accurate predictions.

The long lists and descriptions of fish and animals, I assume, was equally incredible to the people of that day, who'd probably never heard of most of these fish, let alone seen drawings of them. But for me, who's seen some of that in person while scuba diving, and seen a lot of photographs and video of underwater life, the lists of common names and scientific nomenclature just doesn't work anymore.

I did like the plot and the characters, but interspersed as it was between all the long lists, and engineering calculations, this book just hasn't aged well at all. ( )