The Perfect Faculty Meeting Companion
Look, I'll be honest - I started this one during Principal Martinez's quarterly budget review. (Sorry, not sorry.) There's something about Phileas Fogg's obsessive punctuality that pairs beautifully with watching someone drone on about line items you'll never see funded. Six hours and thirty-six minutes later, I'd circumnavigated the globe with Fogg and Passepartout, and I still couldn't tell you what happened to the music department's instrument budget.
This is why we still read the classics. Or listen to them, in my case.
What Verne Gets Right (And Why Your Students Should Care)
Here's the thing about Around the World in 80 Days - it's not actually about the journey. I mean, yes, obviously it's about the journey, but Verne is doing something sneakier here. He's writing a satire about British imperialism wrapped in adventure paper. Phileas Fogg moves through India, Hong Kong, Japan, and America like the world exists solely as a backdrop for his wager. The locals are scenery. The cultures are obstacles or conveniences.
My students would hate this. I love it.
Not because the colonialism is good - it's cringeworthy in places - but because Verne knows exactly what he's doing. Fogg is ridiculous. His mechanical precision, his emotional detachment, his absolute certainty that British pounds and British punctuality will solve everything - Verne is laughing at him. And at us, for rooting for him anyway. That's the kind of literary tension I try to get my juniors to see in Heart of Darkness, except Verne does it while also being genuinely entertaining.
Verne's sentences have this wonderful forward momentum - you're always moving, always racing against that 80-day clock. Even when Fogg is sitting perfectly still on a steamer, there's urgency. That's craft.
Scott brings that same steady momentum to Life of P.T. Barnum, another story about a man racing against expectations and geography.
Michael Scott and the Art of Getting Out of the Way
Now, Michael Scott. Not that Michael Scott. (Though I'd pay good money to hear Steve Carell narrate this. "That's what she said" after the elephant ride through India. Someone make this happen.)
This Michael Scott has a clear, warm delivery that serves the text without overwhelming it. He understands that pause is punctuation - he gives Verne's wit room to land without hammering every joke. There's a steadiness to his reading that matches Fogg's temperament, which is smart. You're not getting theatrical voice acting here. You're getting a confident reader who trusts the material.
That said, I have to mention the Platte River thing. He pronounces it "Plate." As in dinner plate. As someone who spent a summer driving through Nebraska visiting Denise's relatives, this made me physically wince. It's a small thing, but once you hear it, you can't unhear it. If you're from the Great Plains, fair warning.
Some listeners found his inflection a bit repetitive - there's a gentle upward lilt at the end of sentences that, yeah, I noticed by hour four. It didn't ruin anything for me, but I could see it wearing on someone over multiple listening sessions. I broke this up across a week of lakefront walks and late-night grading, which helped.
The Listening Experience
At 6 hours and 36 minutes, this is practically a novella by audiobook standards. Perfect length for a long road trip or a week of commutes. The production is clean - no weird audio artifacts, no sudden volume shifts. Professional work.
I listened at 1.0x because the author chose those words, and also because speeding up Verne feels wrong. The man was writing about technological progress and the shrinking of the world in 1872. The least I can do is give his sentences their proper weight. My students think I'm ancient for this take. They're probably listening to their audiobooks at 2x while also watching TikTok. Different generations.
The story moves quickly enough that I never zoned out - even during the slower steamer passages, there's always Detective Fix lurking around being suspicious, or Passepartout getting into some kind of trouble. Verne knew how to pace an adventure. The rescue of Aouda from the funeral pyre, the train chase across the American West, the desperate final push to London - these sequences fly by.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you loved The Count of Monte Cristo or Treasure Island, this scratches the same itch - lighter than both, more satirical, but pure adventure storytelling. Great for anyone who wants to catch up on a classic without committing to something massive. Best for commutes, walks, or - and I cannot stress this enough - faculty meetings. Light enough to follow while multitasking, engaging enough to keep you hooked.
Skip if you need highly dramatic character voices or if mispronunciations really bother you. Also skip if you want deep character development - Fogg is intentionally opaque, and that's the point, but it won't satisfy everyone.
Final Thoughts
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about prose being architecture, not interior decoration. Michael Scott's narration is solid architecture - it holds up the story without calling attention to itself. Not flashy, but reliable. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for.
I'm adding this to my "recommend to students who claim they hate classics" list. Right between Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Scott also narrates Greek Myths, which sits on the same shelf—foundational stories that work better in audio than students expect. Adventure fiction that actually holds up, performed competently, at a reasonable length. Sometimes that's exactly what you need.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have 47 podcast listeners waiting for my thoughts on whether Verne predicted the internet. (He didn't. But we're going to talk about it anyway.)
