I was so tempted to skip reading 'Around the World in 80 Days' (or listening to it being read to me), but I'm glad that I didn't.
The book sounds like a Frenchman's take on just about everything he didn't like about the British Empire at the time.
I listened to the whole book being read to me on Sunday through a Loyal Books reading on Apple Podcasts, while I did some housework in the morning and then muted the commentary of the football games I watched on TV later that day.
Who needs to hear their opinions about the matches anyway?
I want to watch some movie and TV versions of Jules Gabriel Verne's novel to see how close they stick to the original novel, as unlike the reviewer in the You Tube right at the top of this post, I really enjoyed Verne's novel from a 2023 hindsight perspective of what the world was like then and what I know would happen to the world in all those years in-between then and now.
I like how Verne mentions in the book that the population of India being somewhere like 158 million at the time when today the population is around the 1 billion mark.
Kind of mind boggling to me.
And timing is everything it seems, because I just wrote two posts about an ex-Mormon who hosts a podcast called 'Cults to Consciousness' and then find out that Verne has a whole chapter about Mormonism in the book with chapter 27 subtitled "IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT UNDERGOES, AT A SPEED OF TWENTY MILES AN HOUR, A COURSE OF MORMON HISTORY".
Trippy stuff indeed, I think;-)
Now I'm about to listen to 'Far from the Madding Crowd', which should be a contrast to Verne's story, but first I'll watch the 2015 movie, which I found on DVD in a charity shop for $1, and then see how it holds up to the novel.
UPDATE: March 30th, 2023
I had not heard of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas who was once described as "the world's greatest comedian" by none other than Charles Chaplin, until I watched this movie, and wondered who this guy was.
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