Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne : A Huge National Geographic Article (BookReviews)

I was searching my library shelves for an interesting book to read. Then I saw this one: Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne. "This looks promising" I thought to myself.

I couldn't be more wrong.

The first thing that we get to know while reading this, is that there is an event, in which people become aware about a very important venture. A fearless explorer is going to fly above Africa, inside a Balloon.

After that, I was waiting for the story to get to the launch of the Balloon. Well, It took a surprisingly big amount of pages to get to that. If you ask me, most of those pages shouldn't be there.

You can find some useful parts on them though. While reading, you get an idea of the way that they (spoiler: there are going to be 3 people inside the Balloon) are going to navigate the vehicle and how they are going to deal with potential problems that might arise.

What is written on the rest of them? The interesting stuff: exhaustive descriptions of ventures that took place on the Dark Continent. Those pages seemed to be endless and I forced myself to get through them.

The launch time finally arrived and I was happy, because I was still carrying some hope that this can get interesting and exciting. Well, it did. The 20% of the whole book was exciting. As for the rest of It: It was one of the most tiring reads I've ever had.

There were times where I had the impression that I was reading a huge National Geographic article. I mean seriously, there are endless descriptions of mountains, grasslands and lakes on this one. I'm not against books that can get descriptive at times, but this is a whole nother story. 60% of Five Weeks in a Balloon, is about voyages of famous European explorers, describing the places that the Balloon was visiting and talking about their history. Why is this not called "History of the Explorers of Africa" mr Verne ?

Anyway, let's talk about the characters. I have to admit that this is one of the bright parts of this book. Our protagonists are not perfect in every single thing that they do, and they have some character development as the story progresses. They are believable people, but their actions and choices are predictable. They could have been more well-written.

And finally, some words for the plot. There are interesting things that happen during the flight of the Balloon above Africa. I have to state though, that there is no big solid story here. This seems like a collection of thoughts and ideas that were hamfistingly combined to make a big narrative. To be fair, one of the main reasons that I chose to read this, is that I was curious of how can someone make a solid and engaging story out of an idea like this. In my mind, it is pretty difficult to achieve this, when your heroes spend most of their time inside the small basket of a balloon ..

Those were my thoughts on this book. As you might have noticed, getting through this, wasn't a fun experience for me. In the end, all I have to say is that Jules Verne's: Five Weeks in a Balloon is a tiring read and it should have been one of my last reading choices ..

Started Reading: 21/04/2020

Finished Reading: 29/04/2020

Score: 2/5 stars

You can find this review on my Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3293956726?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

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