"Around the Moon" by Jules Verne (1869)

 

Jules Verne exist in his own universe - even though he is often pigeonholed together with Herbert George Wells as one of celebrated literary ancestors of science fiction, where Wells was story driven, Verne is like a giant geek who thrives on encyclopedic knowledge and likes nothing better than to show off the breadth of his scientific knowledge. That also means that the reader has to have a lot of patience to plow trough what might not be exactly called a page turner - there IS a story but its process is secondary to author's delight in scientific explorations (combined with geography, etc). It didn't bother me so much when I was a teenager, because I would just skip the boring parts, but now as an adult I could not help but notice that it does slow down the story quite noticeably. One has to go trough a tons of calculations and informations before the story continues. Once you get used to it, though, it becomes quite charming. As with the previous part ("From the Earth to the Moon") I listened this as an audiobook during my daily walks to work and back - listening to someone else's voice somehow made it easier and more enjoyable than I expected. My congratulations to Mark Smith from Simpsonville, South Carolina who read this so lovingly and patiently, using many different voices. I have a feeling we might meet again.

Where the previous novel dealt with creation of enormous cannon who will catapult our three main characters into a space (and the whole novel was basically just a build-up), now we have them actually traveling to cosmos. As this was many years before actual Moon landing, Verne had to simply use his imagination (and lots of scientific calculations) to describe imaginary journey - the story moved very slowly but it was lovingly described and one noticeable difference from the first part is how Michel Ardan suddenly became sort of comic relief (where in the first part he was a hero). Our guys travel all the way to the moon but unanticipated meeting with a comet changes their course and they end up not reaching the moon but circling around it. Just lovely. I might even go back to Verne again sometime soon.