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Originally Posted by Pajamaman
I may try L'Île mystérieuse. I was not aware of it as a very popular work.
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Yes, it's is popular. In the first post of the thread, at the end, I sort the novels according to the number of ratings in Goodreads, as a proxy for popularity. We have the big three well ahead in terms of popularity (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas; Around the World in Eighty Days; Journey to the Center of the Earth), and The Mysterious Island is fourth after those, slightly ahead of books like From the Earth to the Moon, Five Weeks in a Balloon and In Search of the Castaways.
It's also one of Verne's longest (3 volumes, so around 200k words). It's not the one with best pacing, but it has several things to recommend it. I think Verne fans enjoy that it features characters from two other Verne novels, which is quite unusual in his work.
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As an aside, I cant relate to reading a huge opus as a challenge of sorts. But each to his own. Time is short. I pick only the best!
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It's not something I normally do, but I felt like it. As you say, to each their own... Of course, if I stop enjoying it, I will ditch the project. This is not a job.
I'm interested to see what happens when I get to the second half of the series, when his style becomes less optimistic and his best-known works are behind. We'll see.