Finished on Saturday! It took a lot of listening and a little bit of skipping [1], but I made it through!
Am I glad I did it? Yes. Am I glad to be done? Double yes. I think if I ever read something this big again, I'll break it up into chunks: read for a few weeks, break, read some more. Hopefully it would help the reading fatigue. I'm afraid the second half of Les Mis didn't get a fair shake from me, since I was just so tired of reading it by page 700.
That said, Hugo is dramatic as heck. Sometimes I couldn't help but laugh at Marius, Cosette, Valjean, Eponine - all of them, really. I know their lives were hard, and it's an epic tale told epically, but geez.
Some thoughts:
- Name play an important role; the main characters all get at least a few
- The story's really about saving Cosette, isn't it?
- The sewer tangent was really not as bad as people make it out to be. Granted, I skipped it, but I think it was only 15 or 20 pages, instead of the 50 pages of the Waterloo tangent.
- Marius is very irritating there at the end, forbidding this gentle, loving man from seeing his daughter. And he's not even man enough to do it directly! No, it's all, "take away a chair here," "don't light a fire" there. Passive-aggressive nonsense. He reminds me of Claudius from Much Ado in a lot of ways - jumping to conclusions, being extra, overwhelmed by love.
xo,
Devo
[1] For a regular book, I would have skipped a lot - about a hundred pages or so. When your book is 1400 pages, though, 100 is hardly anything.
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