Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth wasn't what I expected, probably because of several screen adaptations that were pretty exciting. This book was slow...painfully so. I'm big on description and I did love the wonderful created scenes of Iceland in my head generated by Verne's hand, but there was so much prose taken up by getting to the center of the earth's entrance that even I, queen of setting, was chomping at the bit. I contrast this book to Lord of the Rings, another book deep with descriptive narrative. But LOTR does have action spaced throughout, even when parties are trudging through the sun-dappled, scent laden, bird chirruping forest. :-)
The other problem for me that when there was action, it was over very quickly, or there wasn't enough. For example, an ancient form of man is found living under the earth. He's sighted, and then...goes away!!! What??? No one's going to investigate??? There's a short paragraph on how the man might have gotten there, but that's it. I kept hoping the cave man or whatever he was would appear before the end of the book, but apparently even cavemen have things to do.
My final complaint was that the first person narrator wasn't appealing...he was a whiny, nervous, complainer who kept asking to go back. Even Bilbo toughened up after he realized he wasn't getting his second breakfast.
To recap, in this series I liked Rice Burrough's the best, closely followed by Doyle's, and Verne's a distant third. I would never have guessed that order when I started these. Just goes to show reading old stuff that you think you know can be surprising.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment