Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
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Oh wowza, this book is insufferable. Would you like to read a watered-down encyclopedia? At least you can learn cool things from encyclopedias, and they look all fancy stacked up next to each other on the bookshelf. Instead, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, you can read hundreds of pages of poorly described aquatic taxonomy. So, I’ll amend my question: Would you like to read lists of rare fish and coral?
Even the narrator admits that he’s boring us. After a particularly long, uninteresting inventory, he says, “I end here this catalogue, which is somewhat dry perhaps, but very exact.” Well, this is a novel, my dude, so you don’t actually have to subject us to that.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea describes the “adventures” of three men who are captives on a tech-savvy boat that’s disguised as a scary sea creature. Captain Nemo intends to spend the rest of his life on his ship and he hates anyone who lives on land. There are vague allusions to what could have possibly made him so bitter, but he’s supposed to be a mysterious character, so we aren’t told much. I learned virtually nothing about him, so I could not connect to him as a main character whatsoever.
Some people say that, while the book is mind-numbingly boring, Jules Verne, the author, was ahead of his time with the science behind his imagined underwater vessel. I don’t get that impression. He published it in French in 1870, around the time when submarines started to get in the mix in a big way. His description of the ship was so wildly inventive that it doesn’t seem rooted in fact, and even if it was, I wouldn’t care.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was a waste of my time and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I give is 0 out of 5 flames.
