Around The World In 80 Days
Written by Jules Verne
www.ink2quill.com

“Around The World In 80 Days” known in French as “Le Tour Du Monde En Quatre-Vingts Jours” as a French action, adventure novel written by the great, French sci fi writer Jules Verne. He wrote some of the greatest novels to date around the time of the Industrial Revolution, some 170 years ago. A time before smart phones, computers, planes, modern medicine, the internet and the list goes on. He is also considered the father of scifi with works that include “Voyages Extraordinaires”, “Journey To The Center Of The Earth”, “20 Thousand Leagues Under The Sea”. This book is such a fun read with an unpredictable ending.

Around The World In 80 Days Goodreads webpage

“Around The World In 80 Days” takes place in an 1872 London on the day of October 2nd. Phileas Fogg is a wealthy, gentlemen who lives his lonely life on a rigid schedule spending some of his time playing whist at the Reform Club with his buddies. The story begins when he hires a new valet, a Frenchman named Jean Passepartout, because his old valet was very, very, mildly negligent in his duties. Phileas is a man without any family wife or girlfriend and nobody knows how he made his money or much else about his past. We, the reader, do know that he is a man of his word, honest and fastidious in all he does. The adventure begins with an argument about a Daily Telegraph article with his whist buddies. He made the assertion that it was possible to go around the world in 80 days with the opening of a new rail system in India and his card buddies disagreed. One thing leads to another and Phileas bets the sum of 20,000£ (That´s the equivalent of millions of dollars in todays dollars and half his fortune) that he could do it. Phileas basically bets his whole fortune on his adventure which shows me that he is also a man who takes chances, big chances.

This book is a fun read because of the time it is set in. England of that time is always a great place for a story. That time was the beginning of so many things for us in the West like the technologies that could move people around much faster for the first time i.e. trains. It was also a place where you had social clubs where people dressed up and just hung out, talking about the news of the day, new theories and ideas. Watching old clips of periods just after this one you saw that people were thinner, many dressed up every day as if they were going somewhere special with hats, shined shoes, walking sticks etc. The steampunk genre of storytelling takes advantage of this fact.

One brilliant element to this story is that of the wager. A character, in this case Phileas Fogg, takes a wager that sounds impossible to win. I am sure though that Phileas did some kind of calculation in his head to figure that it was indeed possible, but risky. He also seemed to be a well traveled man seeing how he managed on his journey in the various regions and countries and different modes of transportation. These social clubs were also places where its members bet on various things. So this was not at all uncommon. This novel is really one of the first to exploit the story element of the wager and that´s what makes it so much fun.

Check out “Around The World In 80 Days” because it´s a fun read.

John Ink2Quill

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