Where to Start with Jules Verne: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Jules Verne — whether to begin with Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues, or Journey to the Center of the Earth. A complete guide.
Jules Verne (1828–1905) was the French novelist whose Voyages Extraordinaires — a series of adventure novels combining meticulous scientific research with compulsive plotting — invented many of the foundational premises of science fiction: the submarine, the descent into the earth, the journey to the moon, the circumnavigation of the globe as race. Writing for the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who required that his novels be both entertaining and educationally informative, Verne produced over fifty novels that have never gone out of print. Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) remain his most widely read works and are genuinely enjoyable as adventure fiction, independent of their historical significance.
Where to Start: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)
The essential Verne — the most purely enjoyable of his novels and the one most likely to convert a sceptic. The premise: Phileas Fogg, an English gentleman of supreme regularity and absolute mystery, bets his fortune at the Reform Club that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days. He immediately sets off with his new manservant Passepartout (a cheerful, resourceful Frenchman), and the novel follows their journey across India, Japan, North America, and the Atlantic, always one step ahead of the detective Fix, who is convinced Fogg is a bank robber using his winnings to flee.
What makes the novel work is its wit. Fogg is a comic creation of perfect self-possession — nothing rattles him; every obstacle is met with the same calm, slightly inhuman equanimity. Passepartout provides the anxiety and the comedy. The cultural geography is cheerfully colonial, as one would expect from 1872, but the plotting is precise and the climax genuinely suspenseful.
Verne understood that the premise of a globe-spanning race creates inherent narrative tension — the reader is always aware of the clock, always counting days — and the novel’s structure exploits this with elegant economy.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
Verne’s most ambitious novel and his most lasting creation. Professor Aronnax, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum in Paris, joins an expedition to investigate reports of a sea monster — which turns out to be the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s electrically powered submarine. Aronnax and his companions become Nemo’s unwilling guests as the Nautilus travels from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the ice of Antarctica to the ruins of Atlantis.
Nemo is the novel’s achievement. A man of extraordinary scientific genius who has renounced the surface world for unexplained reasons of bitterness and grief, he remains mysterious for the entire novel; Verne deliberately withholds his backstory (which he would provide in a later novel, The Mysterious Island). The oceanic travelogue is genuinely visionary — Verne researched the marine biology of his era with scrupulous care — and holds up remarkably well.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
Verne’s most extravagantly imaginative work — a descent through volcanic rock into a vast underground world populated by prehistoric creatures and lit by electrical clouds. The science is, by modern understanding, entirely wrong, but the world-building is so vivid and so confidently extrapolated that the novel functions as pure adventure fantasy. Professor Lidenbrock is the most comic of Verne’s scientists: monomaniacal, brilliant, and entirely indifferent to his nephew Axel’s very reasonable fear that they might all die in the earth’s core.
Reading Jules Verne
Begin with Around the World in Eighty Days for its wit and propulsive plotting. Read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for Verne’s most ambitious world-building and his most memorable character. Journey to the Center of the Earth is best read third for its purely imaginative pleasures. All three are standalone novels; read in any order.
For the full Jules Verne bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Jules Verne author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Jules Verne?
Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) is the most widely recommended starting point — the novel about Phileas Fogg's bet that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days is Verne's most propulsive, most entertaining, and most accessible work. The premise is irresistible; the characters are distinctly drawn; the plotting is precise. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is the alternative for readers who want Verne's most ambitious creation (Captain Nemo) and his most visionary world-building.
What is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea about?
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) follows Professor Aronnax, his manservant Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land after they are captured by Captain Nemo and taken aboard the Nautilus, Nemo's extraordinary submarine, for an involuntary voyage through the world's oceans. Verne imagined submarine travel decades before it existed; his descriptions of the ocean floor and its creatures were so detailed that they influenced actual marine science. Captain Nemo — brilliant, bitter, morally ambiguous, and almost entirely without backstory — is one of fiction's most compelling anti-heroes.
What is Journey to the Center of the Earth about?
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) is Verne's most purely imaginative novel — following Professor Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel, and an Icelandic guide as they descend through a volcanic shaft and discover a vast underground world of prehistoric seas, giant fungi, and ancient creatures. The novel's world-building is extravagant and genuinely strange; the underground ocean, illuminated by electrical clouds, is one of science fiction's most memorable invented landscapes. More adventure fantasy than science fiction by modern definitions.
Are Jules Verne's novels still readable today?
Verne's best novels read remarkably well in good modern translations — he was a plot-driven writer whose story mechanics remain effective, and his central ideas (submarine travel, circumnavigation as sport, descent into the earth) are so foundational that encountering them in their original form has genuine historical interest. The key variable is translation quality: some nineteenth-century English translations were bowdlerised and simplified; the Penguin Classics translations are generally reliable. His scientific speculation is dated but the adventure structures hold.
