Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City
The story of Atlantis and whether or not it exists is something that I've only passingly thought about in my life. But over the last week, I read the novel Meet Me in Atlantis by Mark Adams which deep dives on several explorers in their quest to discover the lost city Atlantis.
I never realized how deep (and a bit insane) the theories around Plato's Atlantis story really are. One of the many people Mark interviews for this book is a gentleman who ran statistical models trying to find Atlantis in Morocco. Many who Mark interviews have spent their entire lives in search of the lost city.
My problem with Meet Me in Atlantis isn't that it's about Atlantis but that it's quite frankly boring. If you buy into Atlantis then I can see being swept up by the various theories but if you don't (like me) I found the entire novel to be a complete slog. Adams spends what feels like an eternity breaking down Plato's words, his various potential meanings, and what that could mean in discovering Atlantis. And yet by the end of the novel, I found his "conclusions" to be laughable.
Whether or not Atlantis exists, I found this book to bring little to the table. Great nonfiction writing is when an author is able to build a narrative that brings even the least informed on the subject along for the journey. And although there was an interesting intro to this book, as we followed Mark through his travels around the Mediterranean I could help but drift off and wonder why on Earth I was reading this book.
