What I’ve Just Finished Reading

It took me some time, but I’ve finished Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! I read the translation by Mendor T. Brunetti, which comes with an afterword which talks a bit about the history of Verne translations. Apparently the first guy who translated Verne into English didn’t understand a lot of the science, and either mistranslated or straight up cut it out, which gave Verne a very poor reputation among American science fiction fans for years until someone finally went back to the original French and said “Now wait a minute.” So the Brunetti translation is a corrective.

We also do NOT find out the specifics of Captain Nemo’s tragic backstory, although the afterword kindly explains that there were two different versions, one that Verne’s publisher axed for political reasons and one that was eventually published in The Mysterious Island. (  spoilers  )

Tons of undersea details all the way through to the end, and a very interesting glimpse of 19th century science. Nemo and co. visit the South Pole by sailing the Nautilus under the ice shelf and then popping up in the polar sea, which reflects the popular scientific theory of the day.

What I’m Reading Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall. This is the sequel to Du Maurier’s Golden Lads, a biography of the Bacon brothers which mostly focuses on Francis’s older brother Anthony the sickly spymaster. I found Golden Lads a bit of a slog (Anthony just spends so much time ill in bed), but The Winding Stair is zipping right along! Bacon has just befriended the king’s new favorite George Villiers, who seems a great improvement on the last favorite who awkwardly has just been found guilty of poisoning someone with an arsenic enema.

What I Plan to Read Next

My Unread Bookshelf book for this month is Gene Stratton Porter’s The Harvester. Every GSP book I’ve read has been absolutely deranged, so I’m excited to see where this book will take me.

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