Leah’s Reviews > Les Misérables > Status Update

I cannot begin to express how happy I was to turn the last page. Hugo should be made the patron saint of editors. He is a major argument for abridged novels. This emperor may not be naked, but he is most certainly scantily clad. I assume that his high ratings are because people rate it while still in a state of euphoria on finishing.

I feel like a hamster in a wheel. No matter how much I run, I never seem to move forward. Stuck on the barricades last Sunday - still stuck on the barricades this Sunday. But hey, let's digress and talk about flowers for a chapter or two! I've lost what little interest I ever had in the fates of any of these people. I'm reading now purely out of determination to get to the end.

3 chapters on criminal argot. I've had about enough of his endless digressions now. The man could win Gold for boring in the Olympics. The story is fine - slight, but fine - on the rare occasions he returns to it, but it's really a book of essays. Which would be fine except that it's supposed to be a work of fiction. I will be so glad to get to the end.

Over halfway! He's a strange one, Hugo. First he bores me to the point of screaming with pages full of young men rambling drunkenly about politics, and then he enchants me utterly with a portrait of a young man falling in love. Normally love bores me and politics interest me...

Well, I now know more about convents than I ever expected to, or indeed wanted to! When he digresses, he doesn't do it in half measures. However, he's always interesting , even if I sometimes want to hit him with a brick and tell him to get on with the story. Apart from that, this week we've had a tense chase through Paris and some lovely Gothic horror in a graveyard. Great stuff!

Thoroughly enjoying my very slow read/listen of this. Second narrator now - Natalie Simpson - and she's so much better than the first.

So far he's sticking to the story and it's great stuff. The translation is excellent (which is more than can be said of the narration, sadly). The notes in the Penguin edition are also very good. At this rate I should definitely finish it sometime this decade...

And the plot begins! We meet Valjean whom I currently dislike intensely. Is this going to be a problem? We shall see!

Joint read/listen. Going well so far, though the audiobook narrator isn't brilliant at French pronunciations! It took 5% of the book to introduce one character though, so I'm hoping we might actually get to a plot soon...