Journey to the Centre of the Earth #2

Pages read: 34

Genre: Science Fiction

Author: Jules Verne
Pages 209

Dad and I have started reading a book called Journey to the Centre of the Earth, by Jules Verne. As many of you may know Jules Verne is a French writer, so both of our copies are translated. Funnily enough they are both different translations as dad is reading his on the kindle and mine is a two decade old paperback. This book started off describing a mad German professor from his nephews point of view. It then moves on and gets to the meat of the story. The professor has just bought a book called "C12 Icelandic chronicle of Norwegian princes!", he is about to start reading it, as he usually does with his strangely unusual books, when a piece of paper falls out, a code. He tries to crack it for days, not eating or sleeping, he is that kind of person. Little does he know, around midway through his intellectual game his nephew cracks it, purely by accident. He is waving the paper around when he sees it, all you need to do is read it backwards after applying the failed rule that his uncle worked out. But the secret is too dangerous for the professor to know about as the nephew knows that he will want to do it right away. It describes how to reach the centre of the Earth.

Dad and I both chose this book because it's is a very old book, and translated from French. We like French books because we both speak the language we also both enjoy science fiction novels. We knew this was going to be interesting, and we where right. We both love our translations for different reasons, Dad's being slightly more interesting than mine. Dad's was translated in 1877 by an Englishman at the height of the British empire. This means that he thought that he was always right and that English people where at the height of scientific achievement  Dad loves all of these little looks back at history. In the introduction the cocky Englishman even said that he had "corrected" all of the mistakes that Jules Verne had made scientifically. Another interesting thing is that Jules Verne views the professor as a mad German, Dad inferred that this was the stereotype then just as it is now. My book on the other hand is more pure with less changes by the translator, which is why I like it. Something that we both liked was how the professor was described. He was a mineralogist but he also had fits of "bibliomania" and was a polyglot. We both had quotes that we enjoyed too. Dad's was "he came bowling down the stairs like an avalanche" and mine, a little longer than Dad's, "in mineralogy there are a great many barbarous terms, half Greek and half Latin, which are difficult to pronounce and which would take the skin off any poet's lips." Both of our feelings are positive towards this book, we are definitely enjoying it now, and I am sure we will continue to read and enjoy it until the last page.