Vernian Joy.

A Journey into the Interior of the Earth.
- Jules Verne

This book is wonderful. It's truly a magical piece of fiction. I can't even begin to describe the enormity of the joy I'm experiencing reading it, but I wanted to quickly examine it a little just to get a concrete idea of why it is as beautiful as it is.

It's the introductory structure, I think, that makes it so elegant. The first chapter contains absolutely everything from which the book extends outward, or downward as it may be. Yes, the structure. Naturally, you'd expect a first chapter to do just that, but I've never read a book that does it so well.

The first chapter is heavily descriptive. It is entirely a thickly descriptive narrative surrounding Professor Liedenbrock, the protagonist (though not the narrator, that being his nephew) and the instigator of the absurd events of the book. And they are absurd. The truly wonderful thing is that in the way Liedenbrock is described, the whole idea of plunging into the bowels of the earth seems much less absurd than it might. It becomes the only thing that could have happened. Liedenbrock is a notorious man of learning, an autodidact polyglot, a renowned biologist, chemist, philosopher, he's an intense polymath. He is also ruthlessly uncompromising in his learning and his insatiable, unslakable thirst to get to the bottom of ridiculously complex matters, to the point that he practically (although inadvertently) starves the house while he desperately tries to decipher the cipher that leads him to the center of an Icelandic volcano. He's a marvelous character. So, naturally, given all this, when the cipher is deciphered and the plot begins to reveal itself it's quite clear that it's all going to go in a very particular direction, dragged along by Liedenbrock all the way. Under other circumstances, with other arrangements of personalities this would be entirely ridiculous. And that's what makes this book so wonderful. It's not ridiculous. A character is introduced who is possibly even more ridiculous than the situation, but is impossible to hold in disrespect. You are dragged along by Verne much as the nephew is dragged along by his zealot uncle, but it's no bother because the whole thing wasn't going to happen any other way, now was it?