Daily Archives: February 11, 2010

Alyce at At Home with Books does this meme every Thursday and I keep wanting to do it – so today I will!  This features a favorite book that I have read in the past and this week I am featuring The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.

Last Thanksgiving I was sitting in my folks room talking to my dad about how great it was to be able to download, for free, all the old classic books I read as a kid.  My dads eyes lit up, as they often do when we talk about old favorites and classics and he began to rattle off some of his most favorite books to read.  One of the books in that list was The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.

I did a little research about the book and found one review that refers to this book as the last in a trilogy written by Verne, beginning with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  I’d read 20,000 Leagues as a girl and remembered pages upon pages of scientific information about fish, but knew I wouldn’t be happy unless I read the trilogy in the order it should be read in.  So, I began with 20,000 Leagues, moved on to In Search of the Castaways and finally ended the trilogy over Christmas with The Mysterious Island.  Out of all three books, the final was my favorite.

There’s a review on GoodReads by a man named Seth Ball.  About this book he writes the following:

MacGyver, Inspector Gadget, Superman, and two of the dudes from the movie Witness who know how to build a farm in a day, along with Underdog and Albert Einstein disguised as an orangutan, team up to turn a barren island into a global superpower with a Wal-Mart. Apparently, you take a break from laying in thirty telegraph poles by building a bridge and a chicken coop, and then you get back to work. They also rescue a guy on another island and reprogram his mind, for fun. Aquaman is secretly helping them, but hasn’t come out of hiding yet.

As much as I laughed while reading the review (and I read it to my dad as well and he enjoyed as much as I did), it strikes a true note.  If Verne had lived today he would have easily seen the resemblance between his characters and those mentioned above.

All silliness aside though, this is a story that will appeal to you if you liked Robinson Crusoe or The Swiss Family Robinson.  It takes what those books talked about and really goes into depth with the mechanics of surviving on an island with little to nothing remaining of the “civilized” world.  I’m including my review of the book with this post and I hope you will give this book a chance!  Yes, it’s difficult to read – but in the end the book is so worth it!

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

I loved and hated this book. In The Mysterious Island Jules Verne creates a story similar to The Swiss Family Robinson story that I grew up loving. But this book is much more in depth and provides an intriguing mystery to spice things up.

Five men escape from America during the Civil War in a balloon. They are blown far south and are wrecked upon an island with no supplies.

Verne goes in depth in how the men manage to make a colony out of nothing. In their party are an engineer, a newspaper man, a freed slave, a boy and a sailor. With their combined knowledge (and the superb knowledge of the engineer) they manage to make an island life worthy of making even a modern person wishing to visit.

So why did I hate the book as well?  Like Verne’s other books, the attention to detail was MIND-NUMBING at times.  In retrospect, I am so glad I pushed myself and continued to read because it all came together and worked so well… but the hate I felt at times while reading this book nearly pushed me to stop several times.

Throughout the book Verne drops “mysterious occurances”. These keep the reader highly interested despite pages and pages of descriptions that Verne is notorious for. Despite the slow movement throughout 75% of the book this is, by far, my favorite of his novels. If you are interested in survival (and the men in this book are what a “real” survivor is) and science this book is certain to satisfy you.

View all my reviews >>