Wes
05-24-2005, 06:07 PM
I first raad this book in the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years of high school. I read the first one hundred or so pages in the period of about two months. It was just far too boring for me. However, I then took the time to scale through the minutia and read the meat of the story, and I fell in love. There is a reason why this book is so compelling for so many people. The praise is warranted. Sure, the book has more detail than even War and Peace, but I find that it is necessary in order to fully understand the depth of the characters and their position in the world of Les Miserables. When I first read it, I couldn't help but wonder why Hugo would take so much time to write about a Priest when the priest only appears for such a short amount of time in the actual story, or why he would spend so much time laying out the blueprints of the Paris sewers. Introspection is the key. This is a book for people who like to think. For those people who want mindless entertainment, I recommend Michael Crichton, Sue Grafton, or John Grisham. That is not an insult to the people who didn't like the story. Rather, that is merely a request that you should be reasonable when reading a fifteen hundred page book. At least the story is phenomenal, which is more than can be said for other overly verbose authors like Ayn Rand.