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A review by leeroyjenkins
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
slow-paced
3.0
Ugh..
This required saintly patience to finish. I really enjoyed Journey to the Center of the Earth. So, I was looking forward to reading this. But 20000 Leagues was a whole different kettle of fish. Lots and lots of fish. One might say enormous quantities of fish. Fish.
Verne dives deep to describe and catalog every single fish, cetacean, crustacean, gastropod, cephalopod, coral, jellyfish, marsupial, furry mammal and bird the reader encounters. He also uses exposition heavily to describe various historical events, science, the height of every single coastal feature known to man, along with it's coordinates from a variety of meridians (he was not content standardizing on Greenwich), the expeditions which discovered which discoveries and who led said expeditions, who their contemporaries were, and when they were born, and where they were schooled, and, well, you get the idea.
Yes. This book is wordy to a fault. One gets the impression the author was being paid by the word. Instead of stirring emotion and a sense of wonder in the reader through adept storytelling, Verne buries (or perhaps drowns) us in exquisitely detailed and cumbersome descriptions of absolutely everything encountered on the journey. If you're looking for adventure, yeah, it's in there and it's good. But you've got to grab a shovel and dig through a mountain of fish to get to it.
Seriously, if Verne had known when to stop with the fish descriptions this book could have been a couple hundred pages shorter.
In all, I did like it. But, man was it a tough journey. It ended up being a chore to finish. The effort required was not justified by the literary payout in my opinion.
This required saintly patience to finish. I really enjoyed Journey to the Center of the Earth. So, I was looking forward to reading this. But 20000 Leagues was a whole different kettle of fish. Lots and lots of fish. One might say enormous quantities of fish. Fish.
Verne dives deep to describe and catalog every single fish, cetacean, crustacean, gastropod, cephalopod, coral, jellyfish, marsupial, furry mammal and bird the reader encounters. He also uses exposition heavily to describe various historical events, science, the height of every single coastal feature known to man, along with it's coordinates from a variety of meridians (he was not content standardizing on Greenwich), the expeditions which discovered which discoveries and who led said expeditions, who their contemporaries were, and when they were born, and where they were schooled, and, well, you get the idea.
Yes. This book is wordy to a fault. One gets the impression the author was being paid by the word. Instead of stirring emotion and a sense of wonder in the reader through adept storytelling, Verne buries (or perhaps drowns) us in exquisitely detailed and cumbersome descriptions of absolutely everything encountered on the journey. If you're looking for adventure, yeah, it's in there and it's good. But you've got to grab a shovel and dig through a mountain of fish to get to it.
Seriously, if Verne had known when to stop with the fish descriptions this book could have been a couple hundred pages shorter.
In all, I did like it. But, man was it a tough journey. It ended up being a chore to finish. The effort required was not justified by the literary payout in my opinion.