The Lost World

Edward Malone, a young reporter, wants a dangerous assignment badly enough to talk his way onto Professor Challenger’s expedition, and Challenger is the reason to read the book. Bearded, bellowing, and certain of everything, he has claimed that dinosaurs still live on an isolated plateau above the Amazon, and London has laughed at him for it. The party reaches the plateau, loses its way back down, and meets pterodactyls, iguanodons, and hostile ape-men. Doyle wrote it in 1912 while thoroughly sick of Sherlock Holmes, and the pleasure of the thing is how plainly he is enjoying himself. King Kong, Jurassic Park, and a century of lost-civilization adventure all owe it something. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.