MAX ALMIGHTY

Max Fleischer, director, producer, and co-founder of the studio responsible for the great Popeye, Betty Boop and Superman animated films was also a novelist, although his 1944 book seems less a novel than a fictional framework for providing an extraordinary catalog of facts about nature. In it, Max imagines that he's been placed in Noah's shoes: conscripted to build an ark "300 cubits in length, 50 cubits in width, and 30 cubits in height," because, as an early page screams, "THE WORLD IS TO BE DESTROYED!" Max has to gather two of everything and is not sure how to go about it, as he's confronted by a taxonomy he's never heard of:
"Addax
Argali
Avahi
Babulus
Bassaris
Coypus
Cynogale"
...and on like that.

Worse news: "Hold your hat! There must be some 40 million different kinds of insects in the world." He wonders if he's up to the challenge of collecting 500 species of grasshopper and 1,000 species of cockroach. The rest of the book is dedicated to the prospect of garnering two of everything, feeding the menagerie and little ins and outs of piloting the craft, including sweating the details of whether the ark will actually float under this zoo. Even so, Fleischer bemoans the loss of "ANIMALS FOREVER LOST TO THE WORLD," including Moas, Mammoths, and the Triceratops.
No creationist, Max asserts, "If Darwin had the patience to spend forty years of his life investigating and studying the life of the Earthworm by lantern light, my one year's devotion in the dark will be like nothing." The dark? Yes, 114 pages in, Max realizes that he hasn't accounted for lighting on the ark, so he'll be cruising around in utter darkness for the duration of his trip. Now, see, if the Imagineers at Disney had built the ark...