Two Travellers’ Tales

Pack your bags!

Two more that recently oozed to the top of Audacity’s inbox, this time a couple of traveller’s tales:

Around the World in Eighty Days

First, in Around the World in Eighty Days, solitary and mechanical clubman Mr Phileas Fogg, accepting a challenge from fellow members of the Reform Club, wagers the fantastic sum of £20,000, half of his total fortune, on an attempt to travel around the world in only 80 days. Setting out that very day with his newly-employed French valet Passepartout – and a carpet bag containing the entire balance of his fortune in cash – Mr Fogg and his companion cross four continents, by every means at hand, in the face of endless surprises…

Jules Verne’s acclaimed adventure story is presented in a high-quality contemporary translation by American George Makepeace Towle.

Three Men in a Boat

And – on a sligthly less ambitious scale – in Three Men in a Boat, narrator ‘J’, and friends George and Harris, diagnose themselves to be suffering from “overwork”, and resolve that they, along with J’s anarchistic fox terrier, Montmorency, will take a boating holiday up the River Thames, from Kingston-upon-Thames to Oxford.

One of the most popular and enduring comic novels of any age, the story describes the incidents of their river journey, along with a multitude of humorous digressions and anecdotes, and musings upon the historical associations of passing towns and landmarks. A true classic, that remains as fresh and witty as ever.