To the schists succeeded the gneiss, of a stratiform structure, and remarkable for the regularity and parallelism of its laminae. Then the mica schists disposed in great flakes, which are revealed to the eye by the sparkles of the white mica.

Man, I hope you like reading about rocks!

I have a spotty track record with ~classics~, but saw this one at my local library and figured it was slim enough to give it my time. For a book as short as it is, it certainly took me a long time to get through it, which I chalk up (pun intended) to a lack of interest. If I were asked to come up with a central defining conflict of this story, anything I came up with would feel like a stretch. It really felt like Verne just wanted to write a wacky adventure and didn't care about how the characters got there because the justification was paper thin. It could basically be summed as: we have to go to the center of the earth because "we just gotta".

Axel, our protagonist, and his Uncle Lidenbrock are both minerologists, which explains why so much attention to detail is given to the rocky surroundings that make up 80% of the book, thought it's kind of fitting in retrospect. I mean, who better to send into subterranean caves for weeks on end? And early on there is an interesting scientific debate between the two of them as to whether or not it's actually possible to go to the center of the earth without, you know, getting burned up by lava. (Axel is squarely in the "we're gonna die" camp, and his uncle is in the "don't be such a baby" camp).

There are many times in which they almost die. These instances are almost all attributable to the uncle.

Either through sheer chance or due to the skills of their mostly-mute survival guide, Hans, (granted, there is a language barrier, but this character read more like a robot servant with no free will than an actual person), the party escapes all these scrapes with death.

It was a story that was propelled by sheer willpower of the uncle, who I found to be a uniquely frustrating character who was found to be consistently correct with his illogical theories almost out of direct spite of Axel and the reader. There were glimpses of story hooks and potential threads that could pull the book into a more interesting direction, but Verne chose not to. But it was fine enough and the book did what it set out to do. I'm sure it would've blown my mind had I read it when it was first published. I'm putting this one in the "liked the premise; would've done it differently" pile.