Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours Reading Order

Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in 80 Days, 1872) by Jules Verne is the most purely entertaining of his Voyages extraordinaires and the most perfectly constructed — a clock mechanism of a novel in which Phileas Fogg, the most punctual man in London, accepts a £20,000 wager at the Reform Club that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days, and then does it. The novel's pleasure is in the exact interplay between the precision of Fogg's schedule — he calculates each leg of the journey to the hour, and the novel's suspense depends entirely on whether things happen on time — and the chaos of the actual world that keeps interfering: a missing railroad bridge in India, a Hindu widow being forced to immolation on her husband's funeral pyre, a fixed-idea detective who is convinced Fogg is a bank robber. The novel was serialized in Le Temps and immediately became a sensation — Verne's readers bet on whether Fogg would succeed, and the novel's suspense was real in serial form. Passepartout, Fogg's French manservant, is one of the great comic creations in French fiction, and his accidental purchase of a sacred pair of shoes and subsequent pursuit by an outraged Brahmin is a running joke of sublime absurdity. The novel's Fogg — who turns out to have a heart, and to have been three-dimensional all along — is the most unexpected revelation in Verne.