Blake Books

This is a great read for the serious film aficionado who truly likes and appreciates film in its many weird and wonderful genres.
Trash Cinephile is not only a movie review book but a genre specific guide to the other side of cinema, a great movie companion for both the fanboy and the casual film appreciator.

I bought this book a couple of weeks back after reading about it. Unlike a lot of horror and exploitation film guides around, this one has a sense of humour. The author looks at obscure horror, blaxploitation, kung fu, biker, sci-fi, revenge, and sexploitation movies. There's even a section on the Bruce Lee rip-offs that starred my favourite Lee-alike, Bruce Li. Another section looks at the Italian post-nukes of the eighties. If you're into offbeat cinema, I'd recommend this as a great guide...

This book was better than I was expecting as it provides so much information about all the nutrients. I was expecting a small simple book and this is very comprehensive and quite complex.

There is a lot of great information in the book that is useful for learning about vitamins and minerals. I really like the authors organic and biochemistry explanations on the vitamins and how they work in the body. The figures are helpful to see how it all works. The content is comprehensive and if I was teaching a nutrition or vitamin class, I would recommend getting the book. There is a vast amount of information that is useful in this book.

At a recent Troggs gig Reg Presley asked the audience if they are now all "mild things" and got back an emphatic "No". I only recently discovered that he had written a book. I've never seen a UFO but I hope I have an open mind and I certainly enjoyed reading this. OK it's much more in the style of Erich Von Daniken than Carl Sagan but the reader will be carried along by Reg's enthusiasm.
Don't be deceived into thinking the book is about crop circles (although a lot of it is), it's also about global matters and includes a chapter on the money system. This is by no means heavy or boring - not pure economics - just Reg's views on how it could all be done differently.
As I turned the pages I felt I was reading about the personal journey of this family man rather than trying to solve a great mystery. There are also some black and white photos in the centre pages.
This is a refreshing book to read and I admire Reg Presley for his courage to put forward what he believes to be "out there". Mild thing? - I think not.

This book was wild!! I couldn't put it down.If you are a x file fan , you will love this.Except this is real.

William Blake's reputation as a poet and artist was born from his spiritual vision, and so William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision offers up a different kind of investigation based on the psycho-sexual practices which surrounded this artist. Fueled by new archival discoveries of Blake family documents, her analysis probes spiritual paths and recreates sexual focuses of his work which were initially changed by his pious executor. New age libraries will find it a winner.

I think I did learn more about the influences on Blake's thought. Anything that can help explicate his prophetic books is a good thing! However, it somehow seemed that Blake was less the focus of the book (especially in the first half) than the chronological minutiae of the Moravians, Swedenborgians, Kabbalists and Tantrics during the late 1700's/early 1800's. Not that the info was bad. A chart of the characters on one or two pages might have helped to keep track of them all.

At times it felt like a lot of gossiping and name-dropping without adding much to the substance of the discussion re: Blake. Also, occasionally, the author would pose a question, like "Could Blake have done so and so?" that made it sound like "Could Jamie Lynn's cover glamorize teen pregnancy?" Those kind of hypothetical questions just kinda clanged in an otherwise scholarly book, as gossipy and name-dropping as it was. Also, be prepared to read the words "antinomian" and "millenarian" more than enough times.

So, for what the author intended to do vs. what I got out of it, I figure four stars is fair enough

I love these books. The information is completely pointless,which makes it funny. Plus, there are facts in there that I never would have though to find out. So overall, it's just fun.

I run a trivia company here in beautiful Portland, Oregon. I am always on the hunt for reference materials to craft wonderful questions for my local pub quizzes. I found this book to be extremely helpful in getting my weekly quizzes done. I highly recommend this to anyone who has as big a trivia collection as I do!

Something good:
This book, written before the Internet was little more than a government and university project with a few commercial interests throw in, presents an almost precognitive look at a world interconnected via the computer. Some of the technology described, even if slightly off-base, rightly predicts what we are using and developing today.

Something bad:
I won't delve too much on the absurdities described with a supposedly ancient "hacker" algorithm being made to free mens' minds from the entrapment of a hypothetical space "virus". Nor will I go into the rancid historical references used to back up this laughable proposition (there are more intelligent people than me who have detailed this in reviews here already.) But to suppose that by 2012 (this is a guess based on evidence in the story since the date isn't listed anywhere I could see) that the entire US government would be minimalized to the point of vestigial worthlessness because of over privatization, and that society would be fractured into competing commercial "franchises", run by agencies such as the Mafia none-the-less, is just silly. Sure there's room for satire (I'm pretty sure Stephenson was not a fan of the Reagan era), but an author has to at least give a more realistic time line to work with. This is supposed to be a natural deterioration here, not even post-war, yet, somehow, all democratic society withered away in 20 years.

Something awful:
Contrived plots and silly ideas are one thing. Writing them down in such a poor and inconsistent manner is inexcusable. There are times when the characters will completely shift their narrative and their personality. Just going from the first chapter to the next couple presented such a fundamental change that I have to believe that the first was written years apart from the rest of the book.

Later in the book Stephenson can't seem to find a better way to express his largely contrived ideas than to expound upon them in a fashion that I can only relate to a Socratic dialogue (in tone if not in substance.) First there's the main character, Hiro, talking back and forth with an AI librarian for chapters at a time trying to formulate this Sumerian plot point, then later we get the same type of performance except now we have the heads of a few of these world controlling franchises playing the parts of the librarian. Stephenson couldn't think a better way to get his ideas across than to create lengthy (and quite boring) dialogues?


To conclude, I'm not sure why this book is so beloved. The writing is immature, and the ideas supporting the plot are untenable. If it wasn't for his view of an interconnected virtual world this book would be worthless.

I started reading Snow Crash with high hopes. It was picked by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels and two friends had recommended it to me. It seemed like a safe bet.

Woops.

Snow Crash is a nonsensical stew of crackpot ideas and sophomoric escapist fantasies. If you want well-drawn characters and an engrossing plot, look elsewhere. This book is nothing but a jumbled assortment of "cool ideas" strung together in a ridiculous plot filled with two-dimensional caricatures. It's the literary equivalent of a lowbrow Hollywood blockbuster: a bilious torrent of pseudo-intellectual sensory overload spewed at the audience to no particular effect.

If you're a twelve year old boy or a fan of crackpot philosophy then you'll probably love this story about samurai hackers riding around on motorcycles chopping up zombies infected with a religious virus. If that doesn't sound totally freakin' awesome to you, save yourself the 468 page effort and skip this turd.

Stephenson earns two stars for prescience, but this book is a loser.

Snow Crash is a cyberpunk science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, originally published in 1992. It involves virtual reality and computer science, religion (particularly ancient Mesopotamian religions, Sumerian in particular), linguistics, and philosophy.

Stephenson writes in the present tense, a technique that is typically annoying and inferior, but which Stephenson pulls off reasonably well. This is not to say, however, that Snow Crash would not have been better served by being written in the standard past tense. It's close.

The world Stephenson has created is vivid and interesting. Society has degenerated into anarcho-capitalism; virtually every aspect of government has been relegated to the private sector. Elements of Stephenson's Metaverse are present in today's internet. Stephenson holds the reader's interest with his colorful characters, including his main character, the sword-wielding hacker Hiro Protagonist.

A cast of interesting people doing interesting things is, ultimately, enough to carry the book, which is good, because Stephenson's take on philosophy, religion and linguistics falls flat. Stephenson obviously did a lot of research, which he presents as page after page of lecture from the Librarian character. He's gotten some things fundamentally wrong, however, most notably the development of early Christianity. And his concept of a real-life virus as code is downright silly.

Ultimately, Snow Crash is seriously flawed, but well worth reading.

First, let me say that this book has the best first chapter of any book that I have ever read. After you read that chapter, it goes down slightly in quality.

Perhaps Mr. Stephenson rewrote that chapter again and again, or perhaps he wrote it for something else. Regardless, it HUMS. And it feels different from the rest of the story. Darker, more dangerous, just as satirical, but not quite as funny.

Past that, though, the story hardly breaks down. It is entertaining throughout, very amusing in most places, and harbors characters that I will probably never forget. I had previously read a single Neal Stephenson book (The Big U), which I also loved. Every time I see one of his new books come out, I have the feeling that I should buy it. (I had this same feeling with Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, and Kazuo Iguro's Never Let Me Go...now adays, I simply listen to that little voice, obviously).

The story never gets bad, it is entertaining throughout, the characters are original and interesting, so why not five stars? Well, two reasons. First, I don't think that any of the characters develop, at all, in the course of the book. Things happen, people die, and no one changes. Not something that I ordinarily like to give five stars to. Second, while it is terribly fun, it is not terribly relevant. There is nothing here that made me think, "Hrmmm..." in the realms of personal thought or thoughts of import. Again, not something that I like to give five stars to. If I could, I would, also, give it four and a half stars. If only Amazon would give us ten stars to use!!!

I read this book, enjoyed it, and discovered why it is on Time's list of the 100 Best Books in English since 1923 - Because it is good! So, I will be lending it, recommending it, and reading it again. It's definitely worth picking up.

B+

Harkius

Hiro Protagonist is a free-lance hacker for the CIC (the Central Intelligence Corporation) and pizza delivery guy for the Mafia, a concert promoter, and other things to make ends meet. He is also the greatest swordsman in the world of the not too distant future. Most nation states have fallen apart and corporations have taken over running things. Hiro and his sidekick Y.T. are in up to their necks in a plot to take over the world by a "computer virus" as old as civilization itself.

In this very original thriller that smacks of Lethal Weapon and the Matrix (although written in 1992) Neal Stephenson weaves together Sumerian myth, hackers, Pentecostalism, the world of organized crime, and an America that is scarily recognizable into a fast-paced intelligent story that will keep you turning the pages far into the night. The only problems are that Stephenson is sometimes needlessly crass, and the ending of the book is so abrupt it leaves a lot of loose ends that left me gasping for breath and a little put out with the author.

I enjoyed it immensley, but it left me unsatisfied with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

I was very shocked when I started reading this book. It was highly recommended and I couldn't get through the first 4 chapters. If you like a series that is not funny and hard to relate to, this one's for you!

This is the start of a great series of books, however after the nineth book, OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY, she does a John Norman on the series, completely changing the tone and quality, and the series goes down hill from there, rapidly.

My mom bought the first two Anita Balke books for me because I have always been a fan of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles (and the Witches). Now to her credit my mom usually picks out good books- not this time. I found the story to be lacking in somewhat important background details- some things aren't fully explained, for example in the beginning we find out that she is supposed to "reanimate" some dead guy, but then the story just moves on. I also felt that the sentence structure was very simple and basic and I particulary did not like the use of "words" such as 'kinda' and so on. Does this woman have an editor? I can appreciate the attempt to make the speakers sound real but I think they sound like teenagers. And finally putting it out there that this is a "sexual" novel is far from the truth. I would certainly not recommend this book.

I picked up this book sort of on a whim. I really enjoy vampire novels, and I was looking for a new series to start in on. What made me pick this book up was seeing the comic book adaptation in my local shop. So, I thought I would give the acutal book a shot. I was told by my co-workers that the author, Laurell K. Hamilton, was known for soft core erotica, but I was undeterred. I'm glad I picked this up. It's one of the best vampire books I've read.
The novel introduces readers to intrepid vampire hunter, Anita Blake. She is not just a vampire slayer, but also an animator, meaning she can raise the dead. Anita seems to have a colorful past with the undead, there are scars on her body, that are never fully explained. She works for a detective agency, Animators, Inc. The book begins with master i.e. very old and very powerful vampires being murdered in Anita's home turf of St. Louis, MO. Did I forget to mention that vampires and all sorts of horror creatures are real and accepted in the novel. The police are on the case but bring in Anita for her expertise. Having no love lost for the undead, Anita doesn't think much of the murders. That is until she is blackmailed by the city's master vampire, Nikolaos to take the case and solve the murders. This is just a brief synopsis of a densely plotted, well paced thriller. It did everything it needed to do for the debut of a series, I care about the characters and I'm excited to find out what happends next.
Highly recommended.

I came across this series and decided to give it a try. I ordered the first four books. This first book left me scratching my head in certain areas.

For example, parts of this book read as though it was the second in the series. It seemed like they would reference something that happened in the past and give you a quick up to speed as to what they were talking about and then move on from there. Something you would see in a second or third book to try to catch the reader up to date. I even went back and made sure I had the right book.

Characterization:

Overall the heroine is labeled as a strong "tough as nails" kind of gal. This I liked. She wasn't whiny and she was very straight forward. I immediately took a liking to Anita Blake. You don't really know alot about her past as it's never explained. Some parts are referenced very briefly as I've said before then forgotten, like we should know where she got that scar, or who this person is and how they came into her life already.

The main villian in this story is a child master vampire who is over a thousand years old. The first thing that came to my mind when it was said she was a child vampire, was Claudia from Interview with the Vampire. From then on that's who popped in my head everytime this child was in a scene. There were several other side villians all working together, but even though they seemed like a big deal to Anita, one even from her past, they were snuffed out very quickly at the end and had little importance in the outcome of the story.

There are a few different characters that are introduced in this book, yet I didn't feel like I got to see them develop or even learn anything about their personalities. It was pretty much "This is _____, he does this" Then they would move on.

Romance:

None. This was kind of disappointing to me since I thought this was a paranormal romance series. I suppose I was wrong. No one to blame but myself there.

Plot:

Decent. I felt it had great potential, but it felt very rushed at the end. Everything came to a head in the last five pages and was quickly solved. The most powerful child vampire went down too quickly and easily for how powerful and scary she was made out to be.

Overall:

I gave it three stars, because I felt like it was missing something. Which I understand it was the first book of the series, yet I felt like it didn't give me the information I was looking for right away. It was rather short and I felt it could have been a bit longer and the characters introduced at a slower pace with some more information of the past given. I felt like I was reading cliff notes on what the book should have been. Perhaps I judged too harshly. Maybe that's why there are so many books in the series. It could be that all of the past information in told in the remaining series. Yet, why make 16+ books of little info when you can write half as many longer and better written books is beyond me. Maybe it's just a way to get more money.



Will I read the other three? Yes. I bought them might as well read them. Perhaps they will get better with time.

Gotta love this book. Hamilton writing at her best. The subsequent books lose it a bit, but this one is IMHO by far the best of the series. Great plot, tightly written action, some great little twists, great characters (gotta love Bernardo and Olaf and the poor old cops....), more is revealed of Edward. All in all, this book illustrates what Hamilton can come out with when she's writing at her peak.

Well worth the read - altho it makes more sense if you've read the earlier books in the series.

I know,I know I say it every time but this is book is GOOD. oh my god I just love it. you must read it. Laurell Hamilton you are an amazing human being.

Laurell Hamilton has an extremely vivid fantasy and is able to create situations full of suspense and mystery. Anita Blake is always an incredible character...not only she's a great heroine, but she's also funny!
The plot of this book is very well created and i couldn't almost put the book down!

All right, so I'm up to Book 9 in the series now, and I still haven't lost any interest. Reading these as quickly as I have been has made them seem like one extremely long novel, rather than a series; I can't decide if it's better or worse this way. But the fact that the characters are still fascinating to me and the stories haven't lost anything over the course of -- what, 3000 pages? Something like that -- shows me that this is a series that is worth pursuing, something that I plan to read and enjoy more than once. Maybe next time I'll read them with a little more space in between.

This one was excellent, though slower than the ones before it. Slower partly because it was longer, jumping 150, 200 pages in length over Blue Moon, and slower partly because it was just slower-paced. There was much less action and much more investigating and talking to different people in this one, which was a little disappointing inasmuch as it was Edward's book, and I expected that to be nothing but slaughter. But after reading it, I wouldn't have wanted it any other way, because it was fascinating to examine the disparate attitudes and morals and desires of the Four Psychos of the Apocalypse, Edward, Bernardo, Olaf, and Anita. These four run the gamut of serial killers, since that's what all of them are, and I loved comparing them over the course of the book.

You have Bernardo, who isn't really in it for the kill, but is simply good at what he does and has found a place where he belongs in his role as killer-for-hire. Since he doesn't love the kill, he does as much bodyguard work as anything, and he chafes the worst under the necessity of waiting for a break in the case. Then you have Olaf, who is a true serial killer -- a sexual sadist. He's in it for the kill, but not this kind of kill, so he has trouble with this case as well, but for a different reason: he has trouble because he has a terrible time resisting his own desire to kill Anita. The case becomes something he just wants to get finished so he can get back to what he loves: murder. Then there are our two heroes, Anita and Edward; throughout all the earlier books, Anita has worried that she is becoming too much like Edward, too willing to kill for too little reason. Not surprising, as she has dropped several hints that Edward had much to do with making her the way she is; most of her guns are either given to her or suggested to her by Edward, and her biggest internal struggle -- the conflict between her connection to her two boys, and Edward's most basic philosophy, "You don't sleep with the monsters, you kill the monsters" -- comes directly from her desire to live up to Edward's example in some way. So she has been worrying that she will become as bad as, if not worse than, Edward. In this book, it turns out, she really has reached Edward's level, but not because she sank that low: rather, Edward came up. The empty, cold-hearted killer, who exists only for the thrill of a challenging hunt and a deadly climax, has found love. He has found a family. And when he comes together with these other three murderers, they actually become friends, as much as these people can. Even Olaf -- though his perception of Anita, particularly, is pretty far from what I'd call friendship. But it fit perfectly with his character.

How many writers can do that? How many can not only write a convincing serial killer, but four convincing serial killers, of disparate types, and also portray their interactions in what seems a realistic way? The only other one I've known is Stephen King, who's done similar things in novels with multiple villains -- like It, with Pennywise and Ace and Beverly's father all playing different villain roles at different points. I think it says quite a lot about Laurell Hamilton that her name goes next to his in my mind with this accomplishment.

The story was okay; I liked Obsidian Butterfly, both her story and her power/character, and I liked the mystery surrounding the deaths. I didn't think much of the "god," though his outfit was the ickiest thing in this oft-icky series since the rotting vampire sex or the zombie scenes in The Laughing Corpse. Good to see the theme of horrifying-multi-person-zombie come back around again, thanks to that twisted little nutjob Nicky Baco. I was a little bummed that even after 600 pages of Edward's story, I still never got to see him cut loose and slaughter people by the score; that was Olaf, Bernardo, and Anita. Which was still cool. And I liked Anita's difficulty in dealing with celibacy and her final decision regarding Richard and Jean-Claude -- and it was nice to have a book without the two of them flexing and ma-petite-ing all over the place. Though now I want them back in it, so we can see what happens next!

After reading her other works, this one has the least sex scenes and is the best book in the series.

OMG!! I absolutely Love this book! Anita FINALLY makes love to richard.. and its so much more with him than it is with jean claude! The details in this book are amazing! I felt as if i were right there with anita.. or i was anita. I liked how she was possessed by raina and demanded richard to claim her once again as his mate.. and she had to ecscape all the other wolves so she wouldnt have been had (raped) by another. and in the end richard gets to her, and they do what ive been wanting them to do for a very long time! oh it was so awesome.. i re-read this book 5 times before i moved on to the next book!

Laurell K. Hamilton, Blue Moon (Jove, 1998)

I've been hearing about how the Anita Blake series is supposed to be falling off a cliff now for the last three books, and I have to say it hasn't happened yet, at least not as far as I'm concerned, and at least not in the way many have made it out. This one definitely does slip in two major ways, but not because of the major argument brought up by the critics. Guess I'll be waiting for that one in the next book.

The plot of this one starts off with Anita getting a late-night notice that Richard has gotten himself arrested in Tennessee-- for, of all things, attempted [censored for Amazon consumption]. As a few different characters say, "I'd believe murder before I'd believe [censored for Amazon consumption]." The local Master refuses Jean-Claude and his cohorts admittance to his territory, which Anita ignores, of course. As a result, the local Master, Colin, considers himself to be at war with Anita and company, and we get a look at a different set of werewolves than the ones we usually see. Which is probably the most interesting part of the novel; there's a lot of stuff with interesting sociological implications. It's like dumping a mound of topsoil onto already fertile ground to see if those tomatoes can get just a little bigger.

Unfortunately, the downsides are two. First, Anita herself, despite being the narrator of the novel, seems lost in the tide for most of it; events happen around her, and she doesn't seem to have much control over them, even when she's the center of the action. (Anita, and thus Hamilton, realizes this; she complains about it more than once.) The second complaint is far more severe, and I've heard it echoed a number of times in other criticisms; Anita, by the end of this book, is far, far removed from the sympathetic heroine with whom we all started the series. In fact, she's become downright unlikable. I hope this is a temporary aberration. I fear it might not be.

Still, as far as the writing, it's your typical Anita Blake novel, which means it's a good, solid quick read. So I'm still a fan, even if a number of others I know weren't by this point. *** ½

Blue Moon is my 5th anita blake novel. i think she is a unique and wonderful character...but. This book starts with anita in a sexual quandry over her vampire and werewolf lovers and somehow manages to work a story about rescueing Richard in there somewhere.
I guess i am wanting less time describing how some mans hair looks and what color it is and how his silk pants hug his manhood and more time spent on the actual story. i love laurel hamilton and her writing and her characters . It seems to me that too much time is spent on the sex and sexual stuff than on what anita is up to.
I would like maybe 300 pages of story and 100 pages of description of wolfen emotions and satin shirts.

It seems repetitous on the story also. seems anita gathers a group of vamps and werepersons and has trouble relating to them, runs into bad guys, fights, then a big shoot out scene. sure it is different people but still same story line.

laurel hamilton sure does not need me to tell her how to write but she creates such unique and real characters that i would like more about what they do rather than feel.
I will continue to read anita stories but i have the feeling she is headed for disaster and maybe the best thing would be to "kill every one" and start over with just anita.

I'm sad because this series was great in its first two books. Now the series is nothing better than badly written porn. The characters are uninteresting. Those that are featured are either one-dimentional or completely unappealing. The reason for the decline is the fact that the author apparently projects too much of her personal life onto Anita Blake, thus the dropping of Jean Claude for Richard after the author's divorce.

If you're into rotting-vampires raping shapeshifters, this book is for you. And you should be locked up.

This series has devolved into a pornographic soap opera. 1 star.

Having spent the last book almost exclusively on vampires, after the visit from the council, this book moves more to the lycanthrope side, which was nice. I enjoy the three main influences on Anita, her human life, the vampires, and the wereanimals; it's good to see the interplay between them. I'll bet the next book focuses on the human aspects more than either of the supernaturals.

I liked that this one left St. Louis, though honestly, I thought the reason Anita was drawn to Tennessee was a little bit lame. I mean, Richard's in trouble, she has to go help; I had no problem with that, especially since the reason Richard needs her help made perfect sense with his character -- the truth will set you free, yeah right; he already knew the cops were corrupt, the big dumb knight-in-shining-armor -- and I liked that the Master of the City told Anita no, and wouldn't back down from that, and tried to fight her off when she came and came pretty close to succeeding before she kicked his butt. I liked the vampire politics and such here; it seemed real, that Colin would be so afraid of people who managed to cow the Council, and who would, logically, be looking to expand into a territory they thought they could take over -- and why not his, since Richard has been spending so much time there getting in good with the local werewolves who resent Colin's control, anyway. I liked Richard's family, especially their relationship with their mother -- she was a great character -- and I liked the way Anita handled it all.

My problem was with the conservationist aspect. As much as I love nature and believe that it should be preserved and kept safe from human depredations, I am not willing to take up arms and fight people who are more careless and cold-hearted than necessarily evil, in my eyes. I mean, poachers are one thing, but the bad guys here were not after the trolls that Richard wanted to protect, and while I thought Niley should definitely be kept away from the land and richly deserved what he got in the end, I just don't agree with fighting quite that hard for it. So I thought Richard shouldn't have gone to the lengths he did, nor forced Anita and company to the lengths they had to go to, just to protect trolls from someone who, while evil, wasn't really a threat to them. Basically I thought Niley should have shown up as evil earlier than he did, because there wasn't enough motivation for everyone to stay in town and fight Colin until we discover who nasty Niley was -- and then, when we found out the truth about Niley's treasure hunt, it all got pointless again. So I didn't like that.

But thank God, Richard and Anita had sex. I prefer Jean-Claude as a character and as a boyfriend for Anita, because Richard is way too goddamned petty and arrogant, but I'm so very glad we got past that sexual tension crap. I know, I know, it won't ever go away, especially not since Richard insists on banging other women who then feel the need to come after Anita to fight her for Richard's love -- and if one more goddamned supercreature tells Anita she wouldn't be so tough without her guns, I'm gonna start screaming -- but at least Anita and Richard should be able to cool their ardor, I hope. Maybe they can move towards some kind of resolution now.

I hate the munin, which means it is a very good subplot because I'm supposed to hate them and what they do to Anita, and I liked all of the interplay with the lycanthropes, especially between Anita and the wereleopards. It made them more fully-fleshed characters, and I like that. I liked that Jason got to kick a little redneck butt, and I hope to see more of Shang-Da and Jamil; both strong characters, I think. An excellent book.

Unfortunately, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" shows its age. While the story is, actually, quite good, the language is somewhat stilted and the book takes a while to really get going. I think many young readers will be puzzled by the vocabulary and will be bored. Eventually, the story picks up. However, I was bored in the 1950's and cannot imagine that today's youngsters will do much better. I think that the Walt Disney movie is a much better bet if you want to expose your child to a story that was a true classic. This is one of the few cases where a movie has an advantage over the written word.

It is really a shame that Amazon pushes so many editions together in the same group of reviews. This review is of the complete edition (not the bowdlerised children's version) and references the translation by Mendor T. Brunetti.

This was a reread for me. I read most of the Verne books when I was quite young, and lately wanted to revisit some of my favorites. When I was younger, I was very much (like Captain Aronnax) taken with the catalogue of undersea marvels that Captain Nemo and his Nautilus enabled us to visit. Reading it this time around, I was quite struck with the political picture of Captain Nemo. As a man from an unknown country who has lost everything at the hands of men, Nemo becomes what we would today call a terrorist. He funds freedom fighters. He takes his revenge on the men from the countries who hurt him and his. The portraits on his wall: John Brown, Kosciusko, Daniel O'Connell. I think that I'm going to add The Mysterious Island to my list. I had never read the sequel in the past, and I understand that it provides more background about the mysterious captain.

Readers who aren't familiar with this book are encouraged by this reviewer to rapidly amend this sad condition. I also have to say that I first read this when I was nine (the full version, not a children's edition) and I can't imagine what really needs to be cut to make it suitable for younger folks. I'd hand them the whole thing with a confident heart.

Having seen the movie a couple times this was the first time I read the book and was surprised to see a significant number of unexpected differences. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is arguably the first technical thriller, launching a genre which has since grown wildly in popularity and includes most of Michael Chricton's work. It is a very imaginative book, the story of the mysterious Captain Nemo -haunted by an implied but never explained past - who has built for himself and his crew the submarine Nautilus to be free of the laws of man and to live successfully and sustainably on the bounty of the world's oceans, which he intrepidly explores in all its wonders. Inevitably he is chased by the main characters, Ned the Harpooner, Mr. Arronax the professor and Conseil his man-servant, in the frigate USS Abraham Lincoln. Unlike the movie the story is told entirely by Mr. Arronax and Ned is more a minor character, and a stolid Canadian as opposed to the boisterous and fun loving American in the movie. Also unlike the movie the Nautilus does not sink the Lincoln, but in a duel vents it with steam that throws our three main characters overboard whom are then rescued after the Lincoln, ignorant to the fact they are no longer onboard, retreats from the scene.

Thus begins a promising story of mystery and adventure, the possible drama of Captain Nemo being chased by worldly forces in his incredible Nautilus, the tension between the captives who are experiencing the amazing wonders of the ocean depths firsthand and their captor who cannot ever let them go without losing his own freedom, and the chance for exciting adventures. While all of these things are delivered in the book, they are done so very anachronistically (obviously), with the drama, tension and adventure being there - and being very creatively crafted - but also being very subdued and literally drowned in an ocean of Mr. Arronax describing the latin names of the sea life he sees outside the Nautilus's window. This captures the fascination of the age with Natural History versus today's focus on excitement and adventure in these types of novels. There are many times were the book gets very, very dry as the author rattles of names that you have no idea what they refer to, and even if you google them the only hits you will get are the passages in the book itself! Based on this, the fact that this translation cuts out some 20% of the book is probably not a bad thing.

Nonetheless there are some great moments of natural beauty and adventure. Jules Verne showed some incredible predictive power in describing the structural design, diving operations and maneuverability, and life support systems of a submarine, being basically spot on before anything beyond the Turtle of Revolutionary War heritage had ever been put to sea. The myriad undersea "terrains" the characters experience are particularly cool and fun. Relative to the movie the giant squid attack is underwhelming, but a much better scene that never made it to the film is one where after discovering the south pole (something Verne got wrong obviously) the Nautilus is caught in between two icebergs and must dig itself out before its air supply runs out. But there are some drawbacks too. There are some shockingly dark moments for a book aimed towards younger men from the 1860's which seem to imply they are leading somewhere and could have been great plot tension builders, but they are never fully fleshed out, and neither is the character they are supposed to be windows into, the reclusive, tortured yet brilliant Captain Nemo. The book ends quickly and inconclusively, feeling like a great set up for a story that ends as more travel log than character story or adventure yarn. Nonetheless the book is short and relatively easy to read despite it's older grammatical style which can sound very strange today.

The job the publisher did however is spotty. The cover design of the book is very well done, but the editing is poor with many glaring typos throughout the text.

All in all the movie is much better as a movie than a direct adaptation of the book would have been, with Ned Land turned into a main character that an American audience can connect with (unlike the highly intellectual and uninspiring Mr. Arronax as main character of the book or the turgid Canadian version of Ned Land), Captain Nemo is more explained as a character and pitted more against Mr. Arronax as two opposing sides of a moral coin, and the movie has a more solid story and conclusion. But the book has it's own advantages and overall is worth reading, especially for its historical significance.

I read this book many years ago and still have the book. This is a thought-provoking book, and I can honestly say that it's one of the best books that I have ever read in my whole life. There is much to be thought about in this book, and I intend to reread this book so I can appreciate it all over again. Truly, this book is one of these classics that must be preserved always, for the wonderful writing and lessons contained therein.

I loved this classic French novel by Jules Verne and found it to be very entertaining from start to finish! I was very surprised that I would enjoy this book as much as I did.... I figured "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", like many classic novels, would be boring, but Jules Verne is a marvelous storyteller. He imbues this novel with lots of intrigue and mystery as you wonder how the story will unfold... There is lots of adventure and interesting predicaments, and of course, many unforgettable characters one comes to care about during the course of the novel. Also if you like science fiction then this is the novel for you! Jules Verne seems to be ahead of his time in terms of technology and creates quite a wonderful piece of classic literature that has stood the test of time.

The attention to detail that Jules Verne used to capture the readers attention is marvelous... This book is written in the 1st person through the eyes of Assistant Professor Pierre Aronnax of the Paris Museum of Natural History. Professor Aronnax unfolds the story to the reader of this novel about several sightings of a mysterious object seen around the world by many different people.... Some believe it to be an island, others seem to think the object is a floating reef, a large whale or other large mammal and so on. It isn't until Professor Aronnax and his faithful Flemish assistant, Conseil, take part on an expedition aboard the Abraham Lincoln to seek out this unknown object once and for all. Eventually, it is discovered that this unknown object is a submarine named the Nautilus, on which Professor Aronnax, Conseil and Canadian harpooner, Ned Land, spend the remaining part of the novel sailing on the Nautilus through the various oceans of the world along with the crew of the Nautilus. What adventures they have while sailing on the Nautilus!! And the exquisite detail in which Jules Verne imparts is wonderful. One feels like they are truly reading the actually travel journal/diary of Professor Aronnax. Professor Aronnax writes from a scientific/natural history perspective as he is very much interested in the under water world of the worlds oceans.

The only draw back I had with this novel was that some of the descriptions were a bit overdone or a bit too much to take in (like classification of animal species or various nautical terms).... These descriptions aren't overwhelming or occur that frequently, I'd just find myself skimming through these parts rather quickly.