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neilrcoulter 's review for:
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
by Jules Verne
Somehow I completely missed reading Jule Verne when I was a kid. Not only that, but I don't even recall watching any of the movie versions. I don't know how this happened, because I've always been a voracious reader, and classic adventure stories would seem to be exactly what I would have wanted back then. But it happened. So I recently decided (with some encouragement from that scene with Quorra in Tron Legacy) that I shouldn't let that happen to my kids: they will know Jules Verne.
The first book I read aloud to the kids was Around the World in 80 Days. You can read my review of that experience and learn how unsatisfying we all found that book (seriously--not accounting for crossing the International Date Line? That's it??). Even the classic 1956 film version is tedious. We assumed that maybe this was the one Verne book that wasn't good. This year we moved on to Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Having finished that one, I'm now starting to wonder about Verne's ongoing reputation. What am I missing? I'm an overeducated, widely read man, and I just don't get the fascination with Verne. Most of the book is dull, misguided characters wandering around. Whenever anything interesting happens, it turns out to have been a dream. How could a story about traveling into the interior of the earth, and finding prehistoric creatures there, be boring? Alas, that's how we felt about it.
Glad to be done. On to something more fulfilling.
The first book I read aloud to the kids was Around the World in 80 Days. You can read my review of that experience and learn how unsatisfying we all found that book (seriously--not accounting for crossing the International Date Line? That's it??). Even the classic 1956 film version is tedious. We assumed that maybe this was the one Verne book that wasn't good. This year we moved on to Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Having finished that one, I'm now starting to wonder about Verne's ongoing reputation. What am I missing? I'm an overeducated, widely read man, and I just don't get the fascination with Verne. Most of the book is dull, misguided characters wandering around. Whenever anything interesting happens, it turns out to have been a dream. How could a story about traveling into the interior of the earth, and finding prehistoric creatures there, be boring? Alas, that's how we felt about it.
Glad to be done. On to something more fulfilling.