yong : book 3/25 : Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

1463 pages. That's one thousand four hundred sixty-three pages. I've been struggling through this quagmire, this fontis, for almost two months, and it has been both ordeal and pleasure. And in the end worth the effort.

One neat tech feature: On Amazon, you can read and search the entire text of this book. Had I known about it, it would have been nice for looking up details of a character last mentioned 900 pages prior.

I bought this book on November 3, 1987, when I was in the ninth grade. Never tackled it till now. At times, it felt like Moby Dick, that awful doorstop that's maybe 20% story and 80% chaff, whereas this book was merely 50% chaff through the first half--half being over seven hundred pages--and improving to maybe 25% chaff by the end. Be warned, this chaff makes it almost impossible to maintain any momentum in plowing through this book. Here is fifty pages describing Napoleon's battle at Waterloo, of which only the last two paragraphs are directly relevant to our story. Fly through thirty pages of story only to be stopped cold by forty pages about the history and habits of a convent of Bernadictine-Benedictine nuns. And so it goes. It seems Victor Hugo's ambition was to capture all of France in particular and humanity in general in one single book. He's certainly not the only writer that's tried, but he may be the only one who required 1463 pages to do it in.

But in the end, as might makes right, his characters and their story overpower all objections. Truth is a light, and these pages glow; it sometimes dazzled my eyes, and sometimes blurred them to tears.