20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

First Line:

"The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplainable occurrence which is undoubtedly still fresh in everyone's memory."

Description:

A ship-sinking monster confounds American boats until they discover that the creature is actually a submarine powered by the nefarious Captain Nemo (Nemo is Latin for nobody), a swashbuckling villain with grandiose ideas and deadly intentions. Probably the most famous of the novels in Verne's Voyages Extrordinaires series.

Selected Reviews:

"Jules Verne opened me up to fantasy. I loved 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain Nemo is who I always wanted to be. Here was a person who built his own submarine, using advanced technology, nuclear energy, before anyone even knew that it existed. So he was a technologist, but he was an adventurer. He explored beneath the sea. I always had the picture of being inside Captain Nemo's Nautilus."

--Robert D. Ballard