I have almost all of his books, of course, and read them many times as a kid. Unfortunately, I apparently did a lot of skimming when I was young. I took it upon myself to read "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" out loud to my son a while back, and only then realized how much sheer verbiage Verne had thrown into the book.

You didn't just see a fish out the porthole. You saw this fish, and that fish, and this fish, and this other fish, etc. etc., all with their proper names, and all lovingly described for almost a page, sometimes including long anecdotes about a particular fish and its history. There's a LOT of this. I did better reading out loud when I skipped over it to the good parts.