among other pointless things I've done lately is finish re-reading Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, which is spectacularly Orientalist and pro-colonialist and has a truly nasty chapter involving a Sioux attack on a train and...well, I could go on, but I'd read the book when I was like seven or something and I wanted to revisit that experience. Verne used to be one of my favorite writers.
Phileas Fogg must surely have a tremendous number of fans, especially among the sort of reactionary blowhard who's paid to write lamentations about "woke" and "degeneracy" and so on. Fogg's superpowers are his overwhelming Britishness and an unbending faith in Western timekeeping and timetables, a faith so intense and pure that Verne always bails Fogg out of trouble whenever it looks like he's going to miss a boat or a train. When Fogg isn't trying to get round the world, he lives a life of inflexible routine, going to the same club to play the same dull card game with the same group of British toffs, secure from worry because of omnipresent servitude and what the kids these days call "passive income". It's an alpha-male daydream. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's a dozen Phileas Foggs on Twitter—hang on a second—yeah, there's a number of them, though it's clearly less popular a handle than (say) Marcus Aurelius.
There's an amusing personal coincidence at the end: Fogg gets back to England on my birthday (20 December) although he thinks it's actually a day later.
~Χαρά