Your Daily Penguin: The Misery - er, Les Miserables!

[@nathanfoung2347]

I hope Penguin will publish a delux edition of the Count of Monte Cristo.

[@marykatie186]

I adored this book! It was just gorgeous, but then I enjoy ultra romantic melodrama 😁 I definitely need to read more, and I can't compare it to the musical or Tolstoy, as I'm not familiar with either, but I was deeply impressed by how everything paid off. I frequently hear people bemoan Hugo's "digressions" into the Battle of Waterloo (60 pages, I think) or the history of the French sewer system - but all of those bits, in my reading experience, enhanced the eventual emotional payoffs or gave interesting respites from the almost exhaustingly intense drama at the core of the story. I fell in love with this book in Norman Denny's translation, and I'll definitely read it again for pleasure in the future. Thank you for the video! I always enjoy hearing your genuine thoughts.

[@marykatie186]

I'll add: the glimpses of the musical I had through pop culture osmosis must of colored my expectations of the book. I didn't go into it expecting a raw, real, gritty, masterpiece of the human condition - more of a fantastical melodrama with almost sensual misery and sprinklings of French history and experience. So... It aligned pretty well with my expectations. Lucky me!

[@sadragolshan]

I’m that person! I’ve read it cover to cover, Julie Rose’s translation. Enjoyed every line of it. It’s my favorite book of all time.

[@acruelreadersthesis5868]

Your recommendation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is duly noted!

[@tripp8833]

0:11 that look is priceless

[@Wilsonn_esquire]

I especially love your Penguin Tour because we get all the Steve Tea about those famous, feted, and well-to-do that don’t get the Steve stamp of approval! - I read Hunchback in high school and’ve been in love since, but tried Les Mis half a dozen times before finally sky-diving my way through it, and it’s (so far) the only (canon) book I’ve read which (to me) genuinely smacked of being laughably, eye-wateringly too long for its own or anyone’s good!

[@thefrancophilereader8943]

One of my bucket list goals is to read Les Misérables in French from cover to cover. I made this my goal when I was 15 (13 years ago). I’ve put off this challenge for years, but I will get to it even if you didn’t like it, Steve - so there!! I might even read it this year...I have to read Notre Dame de Paris in the next two months so I hope it’s as good as you say it is.

[@MayberryBookclub]

Oh wow. I loved Les Mis.

[@juliae.8237]

Out of curiosity which edition/translation did you read?

[@MayberryBookclub]

@@juliae.8237 I've read the Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee translation based on the C.E. Wilbur translation, I also read the Julie Rose translation.

[@marcusmusings]

I think if he tightened up the novel and didn't go through all those digressions, it'd be one of my favorite books. I love Hunchback though

[@mdavidmullins]

I found the digressions wonderful. You could say the same of Moby Dick maybe? Actually I've not read it, but going on reputation alone.

[@chrisd8813]

I have to disagree with you. I love this book even the whaling sections.

[@updown.7180]

Whenever i'm tempted to read this I remember that it was Ayn Rand's favourite book and immediately lose all temptation.

[@kimesch9698]

She is precious!

[@ramblingraconteur1616]

I think a huge number of readers born after 1980 approach this text first from the perspective of the massive musical and that sustains them through the text. I read it across three months doing ~100 pages each week to dip in and out, and it never felt like a wearying read. The infamous sewer/cloaca section even came across as fascinating, not merely tolerable. I don’t know if reading it in a 1 week spurt would have shifted that experience. I did end up with almost 300 pages in the final three days as the final movement after the 1832 emeute occurred. It may be a digressive fantasy, but I loved it. Swimming through the meandering Marcel Proust may have been good preparation for this, so I suspect In Search of Lost Time doesn’t receive high marks either (though they may be the prettiest Penguin Classics Deluxe covers). A suitable book for today’s weather in Boston?

[@johncrwarner]

I call it "The Glums" - as it was how I felt after reading it.

[@andrewrussell2845]

Hugo waffled away about the Parisian sewer system and suchlike but I forgave him due to the beautiful passages that lie between his waffle. I wouldn't read it again and although I loved it at the time, there is a strong part of me that thinks I just told myself I loved it dearly, both to justify reading it and to adopt a sense of literary pretention.

[@robertdavis1783]

I grew up in a musical theatre family, and as such know half the English musical’s lyrics by heart (by shear rote, not by desire, mind you!) and a few of the French originals, and none of that has done the slightest to encourage me to read the book. I’m content to hum Do You Hear the People Sing when the urge strikes me and move on with life.

[@ashishkumar-cy2kn]

I’m completely aligned with you sir👍. It took me almost three months to break through this brick, and certainly, it didn’t awestruck me as I thought it would. Yes, it is good but not wonderful.

[@duffypratt]

Never been able to get through Hunchback. There are great parts of Les Miserables, but I wouldn’t judge it by the :believability of its characters anymore than I would judge most Dickens. That said, I think Hugo’s best is Ninety-Three.

[@ThatReadingGuy28]

I hope you have a copy of the brothers Karamazov, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Just started it today and I am enjoying it.

[@g59s]

How’d you find it? I just received it today in the mail

[@thebooktraveller1901]

Hello Steve, I had chosen Les Mis for my Chunkster for June. I waded through two hundred miserable pages before DNFing it. There is an excellent story hidden in there somewhere but it induces such misery that I just couldn't bear it any more and I went on to the more accessible and enjoyable Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas.

[@mdavidmullins]

I have to say I think you are doing violence to the book. (But that's kind of one of the critic's jobs.) I've come to realize that as readers, not only do we bring much of ourselves into the book but that we also bring our lives, as they are lived at the time we are reading, into the book as well. This was one of the great reading experiences of my life. I was 17 I think and this book just swam before my eyes, a lucid dream. I'm sure you have, but have you read the Fahnestock translation? Your point that all the characters are unbelievable and that this is not like War and Peace is absolutely correct. This is literature of the highest Romantic period, so realism isn't the point. Much the same could be said (in different veins) of Greek mythology or even DC comics. These characters are broad, sweeping archetypes. Tchaikovsky is the musical analog here; Delacroix the obvious analog in art. To say that you don't like the novel is of course perfectly allowable, but I think it needs to be a recommend, even a must-read. I myself will continue to work my way through the classics, but I'm not sure a person is well-read if they haven't read 'Les Miz'.

[@jackohara8993]

who wants to be "well-read," though? The egoism one fulfils by "working through the classics" can be just as easily satisfied in a page of nonfiction: that is, after all, why it exists. I don't think you should be recommending based off of a wanting to be well-read, whatever that means. Instead, classics are there to be enjoyed, not worked through: I for one would rather someone recommending a book to me because they enjoyed it, not because it is a "classic" and if I haven't read it I'm not well-read, again, whatever that means. So I disagree, it doesn't need to be a recommend.

[@mdavidmullins]

@@jackohara8993 Nah. You missed the point entirely. Who said I wasn't thoroughly enjoying working my way through the classics? First off, I enjoyed the book long before I knew what it meant to be well-read. The book should be recommended because it's a great book, fun to read, a towering literary classic, and ALSO because you can't be well-read without it. As to the concept of a canon: being well-read means being able to read well. This notion that reading isn't a skill and the understanding of literature, the written word and the sophistication of ideas it allows - that these things are somehow relative and that anyone who picks up a book has an equal chance are all wrong. Literature serves a purpose, many actually, and enjoyment is only one. You may pick up a book and not enjoy it because it's a bad book; but you may also pick up a book and not enjoy it because you didn't have the mental scaffolding in place in order to enjoy it. Without the concept of good and bad, of high and low, you end up with a generation spending all their time playing video games and calling the experience literature. We've seen that in the comment fields of this very channel. I for one think literature matters. We need it. If that's the case, then how can some books not be more important than others? The kind of thinking you're advocating leads to lazy readers who think because they're not enjoying the book on page 12 that they won't enjoy it on page 1012. It fosters laziness, a type of cowardly reading.

[@jackohara8993]

@@mdavidmullins "Cowardly reading". Okay. I am not advocating anything, I am in no place: indeed I come to Steve to be advocated; again, I didn't mean to advocate, I am sorry if I missed your point. Nevertheless, I am glad you know what is good and what is bad; what matters and what doesn't, because I certainly don't. I was merely suggesting that it is okay for someone not to recommend this book. Perhaps I shouldn't have disagreed with you. I am just unsure as to why anyone would do anything that doesn't bring them their own kind of beautiful joy: however perverse it may be. I was not trying to unleash unwarranted ad hominen attacks on those who identify themselves with the pursuit of being well-read -- particularly if that will-to-be-well-read brings them joy. But, it is impossible to engage in a discussion when our words do not hold the same meaning. I would love to hear your answer to your own question: how can some books not be more important than others?

[@mdavidmullins]

@@jackohara8993 Not sure what you're asking. Some books ARE more important than others. (Full stop.) I'm going to challenge the notion that you don't know what is good and what is bad. I bet if I asked you if Shakespeare was an important writer you would know the answer. We don't just exist as individual egos. We are in a real sense a collective consciousness. From the moment the first society became literary and we began to write things down, preserving thoughts, feelings, events and actions, we were beginning to tell ourselves a story - one long story - the story of us. Losing literature means losing that. And yes. Cowardly reading. It's reading which says that the book has to do all the work, that I must be entertained on every page, and that anything I don't understand is the fault of the author. Sometimes it's just the fault of a lapse in of our education. I'm not being confrontational just to be confrontational. The continual dumbing down of society has real consequences. It is how we arrived at flat-earthers and, well let's face it, the Trump administration. So many have become so disconnected with reality that we are now in real and imminent danger. Not intellectual danger. Real PHYSICAL danger. This stuff matters. If you're genuinely open-minded and want to consider another point of view, might I suggest C.S. Lewis' "An Experiment in Criticism". I just read it, so it's fresh on my mind. Maybe someone else could recommend something more current day, more accessible. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to engage. It's always refreshing when someone is willing to do that. And advocating your position is a good thing, I think. Just because I disagree with it doesn't mean that you were wrong to express it. I could be wrong about all of this as well. I don't think I am, but then again, no one ever does.

[@jackohara8993]

Michael Mullins Okay, well my view is that there is no such thing as necessary reading; I believe that all reading is good. You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion!

[@kevintnorman]

How is the font size in this edition?

[@davidnevett5880]

Les Miserables, second part of Don Quijote, a la recherche du temps perdu, Hemingway Faulkner and Steinbeck, not your piece of cake but you like the moralizing hipocrites of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. ???

[@Tolstoy111]

Tolstoy's moralizing has nothing to do with why people enjoy his best fiction. You don't have to agree with them on moral questions to enjoy the fiction.

[@TheRoomNote]

I have a copy sitting on my shelf, it's quite intimidating.

[@lindseybartlett7853]

I have to disagree with you, Steve. I enjoyed what I consider the central story of Les Miserable quite a bit. Did I enjoy all of Hugo's digressions about the sewer system and whatnot? Not so much, but overall I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would.

[@sarahhall4107]

Hi Steve. I cannot bring myself to start this book. I have seen countless adaptations on tv and film and musical and that's more than enough as didn't like any of them. The story is just not for me. However my Dad, husband and daughter all love it!. Sending you and Frida best wishes. Stay well!

[@FOLKEN1979]

Tolstoy called this book the greatest novel ever written. Just saying.

[@davidnevett5880]

I meant not your cup of tea, of course

[@darioa1345]

I read it a couple of months ago and I am a bit ambivalent. On the one hand, it was quite entertaining and it had the teleportation capability of a classic, but on the other hand it was too much: too long, too crowded and an often too banal plot.

[@oliomphalos3657]

It's worrying that the books you describe as self-absorbed or deflated are books that I enjoy... Hmm...

[@saintdonoghue]

Hah! There's still hope! Simply discard your old reading habits and adopt the STEVE PLAN!

[@matthewl5919]

We are entirely in agreement on this one (not so much on the Angela Carter...yuck). I'm a big fan of Hugo in general: Notre-Dame, Last Day of Condemned Man, The Man Who Laughs...all wonderful (er...except for the ending to that last one). But this? Insufferable, especially in the latter half when coincidence piles atop coincidence and one's patience is stretched to the max.

[@timmoman]

I have to agree with you that this book is a super chore to get through, I read somewhere that Victor Hugo got paid on per page he wrote. So he laughed his way to bank and just wrote what came up to his head and most of which has nothing to do with the main story, which is in itself is a quite simple story.