Les Misérables by Victor HugoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What a book!
So much as been written about this book it's difficult to add anything new, except my own personal reading experience.
I chose to read this book via an app on my phone called Serial Reader. The app takes books out of copyright and splits them into small daily reading that takes around 10-15 minutes a day. For this long book it was split into 233 daily issues. That's roughly 8 months with this book being over 1,400 pages!
There were many days where I didn't read this book, and many days where I read several issues. A few times I got way behind, around 30 days. In late June I took a trip across the country and managed a lot of reading, perhaps reading as many as 30 issues, and still didn't quite catch up. The closer I got to the end of the daily issues being released the more I read and was able to be completely caught up for the final week.
In the book, as it must be known, there are some areas where digressions went on and on, and it seemed like a complete stop to the story. This book contains a lot of history of France. If someone knew more about French history than myself, perhaps would be easier reading during those parts. When a new character was introduced we often got very specific and detailed background information and often their parents as well. For myself, when the story connected characters, which was unknown ahead of time that was going to happen, it was very satisfying, an a-ha! moment.
While some parts tend to slow down the story, overall I found the book exciting. Yes, it is overwritten, way too many descriptors that go on and on and on and on. It is easily seen why this book is often abridged and cut down, taken to the basic aspect of the story. Yet when one reads a highly edited book you lose the overall structure and story, you lose much to where you really haven't read the book. This book is a commitment that's for sure, but when I finished I understood why there are so many movie and TV versions of the story, and why this classic will continue to live on.
Book read: Jan.30-Sept.19 2019
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