Gripping stuff
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This is a re-read. It is a very good adventure, one of his best, maintaining a real sense of threat and suffocating claustrophobia under the ground. There are some internal inconsistencies in dates and timings which would probably not get past a modern editor. Good stuff.
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short but not sweet
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Axel Lindenbrock's uncle, Professor Otto Lindenbrock, has found a piece of paper written in Old Icelandic. Axel shortly manages to make sense of it, and it leads him and his uncle to Iceland to an extinct volcano called Sneffells. There, they go down into its crater with the help of an escort named Hans Bjelke, in hope to get to the centre of the earth! They will face hunger, thirst, and tiredness, but odd Professor Lindenbrock will not give up until he is at the earth's core...or until he is dead!
This is not the whole story but only a shortened version that takes only about 40 minutes to read if you do not want to read the whole story or you want to tell a friend about the book.
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Great book, Wrong description!
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The book is fantastic, and if a real review is wanted, then read one of the other ones. I'm just here to say that the book is not hardcover as it states in the product description, and is one of those crappy recycled green covers!
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Deserved classic- science fiction with character
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As well as being the gripping high-adventure story that other reviewers have written about, when I re-read this novel recently I was struck by another side to the story that I hadn't noticed before- it reads, especially at the beginning of the book, as a satire. Verne is not content with helping to invent science fiction in terms of the science- some of which is consciously out-of-date even as Verne writes it, as he explains away science facts such as why inside the Earth's core is not flesh-meltingly hot in a manner not dissimilar to those bits of Star Trek where they tell you how the teleport works. In addition to the science, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth has character. Verne invents in this story the very concept of the mad scientist, in this case Professor Lidenbrock, who struggles to teach coherently at a German university and who is sent on a wild goose chase to Iceland because of one scrap of paper found in a library book. The interplay between our narrator Axel, his mad professor uncle and the reliable but non-verbal Icelandic guide Hans has things to say about the self-importance of science as well as about class and social standing. The science of this book is horrendously flawed but I believe it's the strength of character as well as Verne's fantastically imagined underground worlds that makes this novel not an out-dated joke but deservedly a classic.
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4 stars
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Verne captures real drama and human response in this fictitious masterpiece.It's a book for those who like the somewhat sureal adventure story. The plot thickens as the book progresses and i've read it twice in very different circumstances leading me to give it 4 stars. Firstly i read it one summer holiday in one big reading session as i really couldn't put it down, it was magic. The second time i read it on the bus on the way to work and found that having to read it on and off i didn't enjoyit nearly as much and found it hard to get back into. Not a book to read on and off from night to night in bed even but great if you've got a few hours to kill and you want to make the very mos of them.great book.
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