You know, I've only read a handful of Verne's work, but I think this has been the most enjoyable of them so far, and when I say that I'm including Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Which probably shows a lamentable lack of taste on my part, but Verne tends to pedantry and there's often a lot of technical detail that I just can't bring myself to care about. And because for a lot of this book, the characters are floating on a raft - basically just planks nailed together - he can't go on and on about machinery or geology or what have you, he has to rely on plot and character. He's much more entertaining when he does. This is a short, action-filled adventure about a shipwreck. There's cannibalism and sharks and mutiny and it's pretty clear at every point what's going to happen, but the predictability doesn't make it any less enjoyable. Popcorn reading for the nineteenth century, and it holds up pretty well as such in this one as well.