My letter “J” pick for this year’s A To Z Reading Challenge was JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH by Jules Verne. Every year, I try to include at least one classic on the list, and I was eagerly awaiting this one. I saw the old 1959 version of this on a Saturday afternoon TV re-run when I was a kid and loved the hell out of it. The 2008 version was a real stinker (though the visual effects were demonstrably better) that was saved only by my deep and abiding love for Brendan Fraser. I have to say the book, for all its wonder and whimsy, was a bit of a slog.

The story is, of course, fantastical, and as modern science knows, utterly implausible, but we ignore that for the sake of a good read. That’s exactly what that was. Told in a diary format from the perspective of a young man named Axel, we learn of the adventure undertaken by him, his uncle (the esteemed professor, Otto Lidenbrock) and a guide named Hans as they hike and climb their way down volcanic tubes to the earth’s core. There they discover prehistoric creatures, all sorts of hazards trying to kill them, and incredible giant mushrooms before emerging in Southern Italy with an unbelievable story to tell the world.

The book has loads of rich, fantastical imagery infused with a sense of wonder, but it’s couched between long, meandering, and sometimes pedantic stretches of dialogue and descriptions of rock that it gave me a mental picture of a screenwriter somewhere with a red pen just slashing page after page, mumbling out loud to “keep the underground ocean, the dinosaurs, and the mushrooms and we’ll figure out the rest for ourselves.”

It was a good book, and in its day, I’m sure that comparatively it was a great book, a groundbreaking tale of thrills and wild imagination. Here in 2026. I’m giving it three and a half stars.