Cuppa Classics brings together classic brews and timeless reads. Each edition is crafted for moments of reflection, discovery, and quiet joy.
Know MoreJules Verne wrote about the future long before the future learned to exist. In the nineteenth century, when much of the world was still being mapped and understood, Verne imagined submarines gliding beneath oceans, humans travelling to the moon, and explorers pushing the boundaries of science and geography with fearless curiosity. Today, more than a century after his death, Verne remains not just a literary giant but a visionary whose works continue to shape how we imagine technology, exploration, and human ambition. His stories endure because they do something timeless: they transform wonder into possibility. Also read: London Through Charles Dickens’ Eyes: A City That Became a Character
For Charles Dickens, London was never a neutral backdrop. It breathed, muttered, accused, and occasionally embraced. Streets sulked under fog, alleyways whispered secrets, and grand avenues paraded wealth with theatrical arrogance. To read Dickens is to walk a city that is always watching its inhabitants, shaping their fates as surely as any human antagonist or ally. London, in his novels, does not simply host the story—it is the story. Dickens wrote at a moment when London was swelling into a modern metropolis, chaotic and unequal in equal measure. Factories, railways, slums, courts, and counting houses coexisted in uneasy proximity. His genius lay in transforming this sprawl into something intimate and legible: a city with moods, morals, and memory. Also read: Intimidated by James Joyce? Here’s What You Need to Know Before Reading Him
Let’s be honest: owning James Joyce’s classics and actually reading James Joyce are two very different things. Somewhere in the world right now, copies of his classics—most likely Ulysses —are sitting stranded, looking decorative, intellectual, and completely untouched, like a literary dumbbell we swear we’re going to lift someday.