#178 in Adventure
Congo
- 348
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- Film 1995
- On screen
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Our view
“Congo” is a brisk lost-world adventure, at its best when the expedition is deep in the rainforest and in trouble. Crichton loads it with science and technical detail, which gives the hunt for diamonds a convincing surface, though some readers feel it stalls the action. Some also find the characters functional rather than likeable and the book dated; readers after an old-fashioned jungle thriller may not mind either.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Congo is a 1980 lost world science fiction novel by Michael Crichton, the fifth under his own name and the fifteenth overall. The novel centers on an expedition searching for diamonds and investigating the mysterious deaths of a previous expedition in the dense tropical rainforest of the Congo. Crichton calls Congo a lost world novel in the tradition founded by Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, featuring the mines of that work's title.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen once.
- FilmCongoIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 6.9 across 510 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 78% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Adventure average of 7.8. That is how 7.1 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 6.7 | 45 | 9% |
| Google Books | 9.0 | 6 | 1% |
| Hardcover | 6.9 | 459 | 90% |
Frequently asked
How long is Congo?
It has 348 pages — shorter than 72% of the ranked books in Adventure.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Adventure — with scores between 7.2 and 7.5, closest to this book.
