This book suffered, at the hands of the older English translators, many of the same indignities and mutilations that I mentioned in my review of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (for instance, in the version I read, the Professor's name was Hardwegg, not Lidenbrock!), and this no doubt produces a reading experience much inferior to the one Verne actually intended; but even reading it in one of these impaired translations, it came across to me as one of Verne's better books, and one of those that best stand the test of time. The characters are actually interesting, the quest is a genuinely intriguing one into a fascinating and well-realized setting (the descriptions, for once, really are descriptive, not lists of plant and animal species :-)) and there is a sense of adventure, with a climax that truly is climactic -- though I felt that it was followed by a rather lame ending. That, however, doesn't really detract from the story itself.

Verne's speculations about the interior of the earth, of course, don't match the theories of modern science. (His various references to fossils and to the great age of the earth, BTW, reflect old-earth creationism --he was a practicing Catholic-- which in his day was more dominant than the modern young-earth variety, rather than classical Darwinism.) This, however, didn't pose any problem for my suspension of disbelief. My main criticism of the book is his Victorian sexism: the professor's niece (who's probably as brave and capable as Axel), as the party is setting out, bemoans the fact that she can't go because she's a woman --and nobody has sense enough to tell her, "Hurry up, you've got ten minutes to pack a knapsack!" :-)