mobilis in mobili

Earlier this week I finished reading Jules Verne's "20000 Leagues Under the Sea." It is a book, that, strangely, I've never read before. A few years ago when Verne's lost manuscript "Paris in the Twentieth Century" was found and published it became one of my favorite books. I think how natural it would have been to move on to other Verne material, but I never did. Also, being the huge Aquaman dork that I am, one would think that I would have read up on other famous underwater tales, but once again, I didn't.

Anyway, I started reading it and I was soon aware of the similarities of the three protagonists stuck on Nemo's Nautilus and me riding the train everyday to work in the dark deep file-basements of the evil law office in Mineola. While the Professor Aronnax and his aide Conseil were busy classifying aquatic life into animal species, subspecies, classes, and orders; I was slaving away looking for boxes within stacks by room searching for files and sub-documents within them. They had more fun than I ever did though. Luckily, my "adventure" only lasted two short (but emotionally-scarring) weeks while they were trapped onboard Nemo's vessel for approxiamately a year. Whew!

As for my next book I'm trying to decide between finding what happens to Nemo by reading Verne's "Mysterious Island" or moving onto another great seafaring tale, "Moby-Dick." I've heard through the great internet grapevine that the stories of the two Captains, Nemo and Ahab, are often researched in comparitive lit classes. I could pretend that I'm back in college!