Jules Verne Collection: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days and A Complete Biography of Jules Verne

These books were a gift to my 9 years-old granddaughter who did not know yet Jules Verne's work. She absolutely loved it.

If you haven’t read Verne before, his books are the definition of adventure. He creates adventure with the supporting background of science and history.These translations, which are necessary since the originals are in French, are well done. Bravo!There is a reason that classics remain classics; a truly inspiring collection.

I read Twenty Thousand Leagues when I was a child. It was a very old edition of the first English translation. At that age I knew nothing about translations. I loved the book.I picked it up recently. The old book was fragile and the print tiny so did some reading and it seems that the original English translation is deemed to be very poor with a great many translation errors and significant omissions. I did a little more research and found this translation which is said to be more accurate to the story.I am 85 pages in right now and find this version very disappointing. The first problem is that it is full of typos and incomplete punctuation. There is a glaring error every two or three pages. Sometimes multiple errors per page. This is distracting and in the end seems a bit shoddy. Any basic copy editor would have caught these mistakes easily and it makes me wonder if it was ever edited at all. There are also stray nonsensical type characters that suggest this is scanned document with text recognition. The type set is unattractive and the paragraphs are spaced and un-endented. Maybe this is consistent with the original French? Even so, it looks more like a business letter than a story.I'm giving it three stars simply because of the great story and Verne's content. The printing and editing would get one star, the translation two or maybe three.I may go back to the "inferior" original translation and just take care not to damage the old book.The translation itself seems wooden and inelegant. I do not know French but it seems like the translator translated word for word from the French without attempting to make it sound natural in theEnglish.I'm pretty disappointed.Addendum: After reading further I came upon blocks of texts, whole paragraphs, from earlier chapters inserted into later chapters. Typos and punctuation errors increased. I changed my star rating to 2 stars and have sent the book back in for a refund.

I ordered a book of Jules Verne stories in March. I just recently started reading it. I discovered last night that over 200 pages are missing in the middle of the book!