Down Where It’s Wetter

Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is a famous old book that I was sure I’d read. I’m not certain how this belief settled in, but it can happen. As the years pass. As the brain cells die.

With time, an appreciation of Julie Christie can be confused with a comprehensive knowledge of the complete works of Thomas Hardy. I feel like I’ve read a great deal more William Thackeray than I have (none) because I’m such a big fan of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. By the time I saw all the episodes of the Soviet screen adaptation of War and Peace, I could have sworn I’d read the novel several times, possibly in Russian. But when I tried to figure out how many of the various movies, television series, animated adaptations, and spinoffs of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea I’d viewed over the years, I realized, to my surprise, that I’d no more seen it than read it.

I even had the name wrong. Verne used the phrase...