Dino Part Three

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.

Dino Part Two

I know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mostly because of Sherlock Holmes as I would guess is true for most people. He did write other kinds of stories though, including the next book in the dinosaur collection, the Land that Time Forgot.


It's actually quite similar to the books I just read by Rice Burrough's; prehistoric beasts, check, missing human links, check, journal-style writing, check. I would say for me this book was better written than Rice Burrough's, yet not as exciting. Maybe that's because they were so much alike and this was the second one I'd read. :-) At any rate, it was good, I enjoyed it.

Dino Part One

In my quest for summer reading and keeping to my budget, I'm interspacing current with classic. Budget-wise you can't get a better deal than classic literature...it's free or nominal. After the Oz books I decided to tackle some SF greats, and found a collection that all hover around the dinosaur theme, namely, all three of Edgar Rice Burrough's Caspak novels (The Land that Time Forgot, The People that Time Forgot, and Out of Time's Abyss), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

I've read Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but the others I had not. I know of them of course, and have seen various TV and movie adaptations and so was eager to try.

I finished the last of the of Edgar Rice Burrough's last night and was pleasantly surprised. For being so old, they are still fresh and exciting, even though much of the science is outdated and the prose is written past tense journal-style. I wasn't as pleased with the idea that as man evolved he became more Anglo looking, and the women, although "plucky" (his word), often must be saved. Even though some of the floundering women have lived in the jungle all their lives. Sigh.

Even so, I enjoyed them. It's fun reading the foundation literature that both sci-fi and fantasy come from.