This fall I was apparently in the mood to reread old favorites. That meant, as I have reviewed them here, books like Dracula, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of course, Sherlock Holmes.

For today I am reviewing another old favorite that is a different kind of creation from the imagination of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This one is The Lost World.

The Lost World is a classic adventure story about a small team of Englishmen verifying stories of a lost plateau in an unknown part of the Amazon. It begins with Professor Challenger, a man both brilliant and impossibly conceited, who insists he’s found living dinosaurs in the depths of the Amazon. His claim is met with laughter, of course, but soon a small band of skeptics and a young journalist who narrates the story set out to see for themselves. What follows is a journey into a landscape untouched by time, where science and wonder blur together in danger and adventure.

This is not just a classic adventure story about dinosaurs and a lost plateau in the Amazon. It is a story written in a time when the last undiscovered places were few and far between, when great mysteries and wonders within our world were already becoming an impossibility.

Dr. Challenger and Sherlock Holmes, both creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, are two very different expressions of intellect and temperament. Sherlock Holmes, of course, is always the cool, analytical mind: precise, detached, and methodical.

Dr. Challenger, on the other hand, is wild energy barely contained. He is a scientist driven not by order but by discovery. He is volcanic where Holmes is detached. Challenger’s brash and emotional nature is a constant trial, but his intellect is undoubted even by those whom he most antagonizes.

If you have not yet read this classic adventure tale, you owe it to yourself to do so. One suggestion for a first read would be to pair it with Michael Crichton’s book of the same name, obviously the inspiration for Crichton’s bestseller.

One final word on Doyle’s The Lost World. This was my 3rd or 4th rereading of this classic, and it will not be my last. Unlike Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World is staying on my To-Be-Reread-Yet-Again.