Reading Jules Verne out loud

In my homeschooling, I have a somewhat long history with Jules Verne. When W. was five or six, we participated in a biography fair, so we learned about Nellie Bly. (If you haven't ever heard of Nellie Bly, look her up. She was pretty darn amazing.) When Verne's Around the World in 80 Days came out, she was a newspaper reporter and decided to try to recreate his fictional trip. If memory serves, she managed to travel around the world in slightly less than 80 days. Since we were learning about Nellie Bly, I decided to read Verne's Around the World. 

At this point in life, I read at lunch time. I figured if I gave everyone lunch, I then had a captive audience. It also helped that W. was an extremely precocious listener and the rest just came along for the ride. We had read Peter Pan a year before, and good golly that was a slog. I figured if we could all survive that then I could pretty much safely read anything. So I did. 

We actually liked Around the World. We mapped out Phileas Fogg's travels and compared them to Nellie Bly's actual travels. With people being so young, I kind of glossed over the more difficult parts of the book that haven't aged well, and no one was the wiser. 

Then quite a few years later, we were studying the ocean, so I decided that reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would be perfect. It was one of the few books that I began as a read aloud and didn't finish. Okay, I didn't finish reading it out loud, but I did skim through to the end because I wanted to compare it to the movie. D. is still more than a little annoyed at me for stopping it. I've told him he can finish it himself, but so far he hasn't. There were just so many fish. Lists and lists and lists of fish and other plants and animal found in the sea. The part of the story with Captain Nemo and the submarine was small compared to the fish. And it wasn't just names of fish, it was Latin names of fish. There just came a point where I couldn't bring myself to read it out loud any longer. 

It was with a little trepidation that I began reading Voyage to the Center of the Earth earlier this month. I had flipped through it first just to double check that we wouldn't end up with pages and pages of lists of rocks. There are some lists of rocks, but they are of a more manageable amount. I had warned everyone when we started that it was a book written about 150 years ago, and thus would probably have some significantly outdated scientific ideas. It seems that most of my children took that warning as a challenge. While we are enjoying the actual story, it seems that the thing everyone is enjoying the most is comparing what we are learning in geology with what is written in the book. Every day, they all hang on every word waiting to be the first to jump in with their views on Jules Verne's scientific errors. For the most part, they aren't wrong. I spend my time trying to figure out how any of them are still alive given they started out with water for three days and food for twenty. It took them a good couple of weeks to find a water source and they've been underground for forty-seven days where we left them today. Scientific errors I can let go because of the age of the book, but the basic need for food and water hasn't changed. It seems as though it is a basic plot point which should have been addressed. 

We are all beginning to wonder how they get up to the top of the earth again. We are now over halfway through and they are still continuing downwards. All I can think of is that if it has taken them 47 days so far, they're not going to make it if they take 47+ days to get out. I find myself wanting to tell them they'd better just turn around right now like an exasperated parent.