20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1869)

I knew nothing of the story before hand and I am glad I didn't as it only added to my enjoyment. I absolutely loved this, probably more in fact than Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I love the sense of adventure which Verne manages to capture. The small details also add real depth the story like all good science fiction. He mentions manometers used to measure depth and how the craft is propelled and steered. How he came up with this at a time when this kind of transport was almost un heard of is quite simply amazing.

Again, there are few characters but by the end of the book they are fully formed people that draw an emotive reaction to their reactions and decisions. There are a few similarities with the charcters, a scientific 'master', a loyal 'servant' and a 'guide' of sorts.

I simply have to read my way through all of Jules Verne's work now. Only 52 other novels to go. ( )

This was kind of like reading a science textbook with an action scene added every couple chapters. I did actually laugh once, but other than that it was painful. I really wanted to find out if anything would happen so I listened to the whole thing, but nothing really ended up happening. It really just felt like Verne was showing off how smart he was the whole time. It was a series of, "How will we survive/conquer this problem?" and then some scientific solution. I can see some science people really digging it, but I'm not sure how it got to be so popular.

One strange thing, this audio book was about 11 hours long, but I saw another version that was 18 hours long. Both claimed to be unabridged. Seems crazy that one narrator would read almost half as fast as another. This one didn't seem especially fast or anything. ( )

A well written adventure that fails to captivate.

The large majority of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea feels like a walk through a museum in your mind. When you're done looking at one exhibit you walk to the next and listen to your tour guide, in this case Aronnax, explain to you what exactly you're looking at.
Unfortunately if you don't know genus' or scientific names of marine lifeforms you *still* won't know what I'm looking at most of the time.

Sadly there's not much plot to go along with it. Or any most of the time. Instead you get full paragraphs explaining things that you in all likelihood don't care about. Like what kind of lens the lights on the submarine uses. For a long time the things the characters are doing and the places they visit don’t matter at all to the plot. You travel from a dull event to another dull event to "ooo sharks" and repeat.

Aronnax is clearly an extremely smart guy but grovels to the psychopath that is Captain Nemo. Usually because Nemo explains how a battery works or whatever. If you introduced Aronnax to Google he'd willingly enslave himself to you forever. It honestly felt like an abusive romance. Like someone told Edward "find someone who looks at you the way Aronnax looks at Nemo" and he went out and found Bella.

Nemo demands loyalty and complete obedience in return for... not killing our party? This man imprisons our three characters which they accept for far too long. By the time the three of them are like “yo maybe we should like... leave?” I was skipping paragraphs trying to get to the end.

On a more positive note it reads really smooth. Much better than the only other 19th century book I’ve read, Sleepy Hollow. And there are occasionally scenes that land with an emotional punch though most of them are towards the end after you’ve already suffered through endless paragraphs telling you which cetaceans and mollusks and medusae Aronnax can currently see.

2.5 due to a strong ending and good friends. Maybe 2 for continuously telling me you killed animals that wouldn’t even defend themselves. ( )

It's really more of a 3.5. I enjoyed all of the sea-adventuring parts but it dragged a bit in the middle. ( )

Professor Aronnax, his faithful servant Conseil and Canadian harpooner Ned Land, begin an extremely dangerous journey to rid the seas of a little-known and terrifying sea monster. However, the "monster" turns out to be a giant submarine, commanded by the mysterious captain Nemo, by whom they are soon held captive.

One of the great adventure classics of Jules Verne, father of science fiction, a truly fantastic journey.

New empires and militarism were emerging in Europe and Asia, and the United States was recovering from an exhaustive civil war. Despite political instability, it was a time of revolutionary innovation. It was at this time that Jules Verne published 20,000 leagues under the sea.

Imagination is the mother of invention and Jules Verne was ahead of his time. When 20,000 leagues were published, submarines were small primitive devices, prone to sinking and virtually untested. This book brought submarines to full public awareness, stimulating innovation and experimentation. In addition to being imaginative, Jules Verne was impeccable in his research. The extent to which he included the scientific name of every creature under the sea was exhaustive. There are literally pages made up of lists of species, genera and family names for all the marine life they encountered. There is a meticulous description of everything. ( )