As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this book is quite poorly written. But I think it's still enjoyable, in part because you can see the hand of the author pulling the strings so much that it becomes funny. I read an annotated version with context and comments from Verne's editor, and would recommend you to do the same if you're curious.

As an example, there's an entire chapter dedicated to Michel and his professor friend going through a long list of nineteenth-century authors and passing judgment on them. You would expect this to be the thinly disguised opinions of Jules Verne, but no, it's the thinly disguised opinions of Verne's editor, which Verne included in the hopes that it would help the book get published. Obviously, this was not successful.

I have a theory about Verne that's strongly based on this book. He is sometimes called a technological visionary, but most of the inventions of his books were already known at his time (the first submarine was made in 1620, Around the World in Eighty Days is likely based on an itinerary in a magazine Verne read, etc.), and what was not known, Verne often made work using lots of artistic license (like the giant gun from the Earth to the Moon, which would kill the passengers with the acceleration; Verne did not invent rockets). No, Verne's genius was that he took the progress that was already visible and used it to create adventures, that he created a vision of the future where all this technology is used to explore deep underground caves and the sea floor and outer space and find fascinating things there. And Paris in the Twentieth Century is the negative version of this, a world where technological progress does not expand imagination, but instead limits it, as everything gets economically optimised to death. It's a good warning to keep in mind.

Case in point: Pangram says this article is 80% AI-written. [1] I only started suspecting in the very last paragraph ("Michel Dufrénoy crosses Verne's frozen Paris carrying almost nothing: a memory of books, a love of poetry, a handful of dying flowers and the name of someone he loves." is a vaguely poetic-sounding structure that I've already seen dozens of times in the last year).

Ignore the debates about quality. This means that this article's message is a lie; all of the opinions expressed here come not from a human, perhaps an inhabitant of Paris, but from a machine. The salvation suggested in the form of Parisian 1960s poets does not come from someone who likes to read them, but from a machine reporting on its training data. (Here it's not controversial -- what else can an LLM know about a poet besides what has been written about them?)

I feel like exploring a cave now.

[1] The 20% flagged as human is mostly direct quotations from the book, which is a nice sign that Pangram isn't making things up randomly.