Wednesday Book Recommendation: March Booking It

Remember that movie, Jurrasic Park?

Well, the book I'm talking about today is nothing like the movie, so don't let the title fool you! :-) As part of the Booking It program that Jessica (Life as Mom) is hosting, I chose The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as my March Booking It selection.

There is no eccentric millionaire with too much free time who decides to hire scientists to create dinosaurs and build a theme park. Conan Doyle instead creates a "Lost World" that has always existed in the midst of the Amazon. A hidden world, lost to civilization, that is unexpectedly stumbled upon during a routine expedition to South America. When the British professor returns to England and shares his findings, he is laughed out of the scientific community. This makes him quite nasty to any and all who would question him, until a little reporter, in a quest to become a hero for the sake of his lady friend, is granted an interview and earns the professor's temporary trust. Eventually our worthy reporter finds himself on a tour of South America in the company of the original professor and two other British gentlemen (another trusted scientist and a fearless explorer). There are, of course, dinosaurs, but Conan Doyle also writes a tribe of ape-men (or "missing links") into the story who are eventually removed by war. Plenty of drama and adventure, some heroics, eventual justification in the eyes of the British scientific community, and love lost. The End. 

If I seem less than enthusastic about this book, it's because I am. Personally, I don't think anything can hold a candle to Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" character. The Lost World is fairly well written, but I won't be looking for the other books in the series. In fact, had I not planned on reading it for the Booking It challenge, I would have put it down less than half-way through. Now, I will admit that as I read more of the book it became more interesting, but it still didn't hold my interest like the Sherlock Holmes stories do. So, my final advice would be to skip this book and read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes if you want to read fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

To review, here is my original 2010 Booking It List:

1. The Bible (that won't be in a month, but in a year)
2. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
3. The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - March
4. Taliesin by Stephen R. Lawhead - April
5. The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis - January
6. Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
7. Skating Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
8. Becoming a Person of Influence by John C. Maxwell and Jim Dornan
9. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne - February
10. Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott
11. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
12. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

My Booking It choice for April is Taliesin by Stephen R. Lawhead. How are you coming in your Booking It reading for 2010? Found anything interesting? I'm linking this up to the Life as Mom Booking It post so you can find out what other people have been reading in the last month.