20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne (1869). Finding myself, for the time being, without new books to read, I'm re-reading books read long ago, or left languishing on the shelf forever (holy cow, will I wind up actually reading The Anatomy of Melancholy?). I was given 20,000 Leagues when I was a small child, and it was beyond me. Later, I just never got around to it. Now I've read it, and don't take this the wrong way, but I found it incredibly boring. It was a struggle to get through more than ten pages without falling asleep. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying it's bad -- indeed, as Nam June Paik once said, "Boredom is not necessarily a negative quality," (or words to that effect). Verne does an amazingly prescient job of laying out what would be necessary to create a working, modern submarine (though it's certainly a shame that we still don't have an electrical generation system as efficient and powerful as the one he portrays). The descriptions of the undersea flora and fauna are certainly colorful, but often become tedious as science-geek narrator, Professor Aronnax, catalogs them endlessly, by their Latin names and classifications. Captain Nemo is a great and original concept -- the most interesting of the characters. But even he comes off rather two-dimensional. I don't know -- it may be the fault of the (uncredited) translation, and admittedly, my old copy is one of the incomplete editions, but the book's voice is sadly flat and dowdy. And considering the amazingly modern voice of Melville's Moby Dick, which was published almost 20 years earlier, age would not seem to be the necessary cause. So please don't yell at me, Verne fans. It's a classic, time has proven that. And I'm glad to have finally read it. I just didn't expect it to be quite so flat-footed. That said, it's all subjective, and your reaction may differ. Project Gutenberg has a complete version available for download -- read and decide for yourself.