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Les Misérables
There is a special sort of RPG nerd who will, if you admit to him at a party that you have been known to enjoy the odd roll of a 20-sided die yourself, pin you to the wall with the sheer force of his nerdosity and tell you in excruciating detail, step by step, die roll by die roll, about the most recent game he has played in his current campaign. The one I most often think of is the one who buttonholed my friend Clint at a party close to twenty years ago and subsequently proceeded to tell Clint all about one small part of his most recent LotR gaming session, in which he played a dwarf who rushed into battle and was promptly trampled by an oliphaunt. That was it. It took twenty-five minutes for this story to unfold, hit point by hit point, and as a direct result Clint never again admitted that he was a gamer to anyone he didn't already know.
This is pretty much what I feel like after reading Victor Hugo's eighteen chapters about Waterloo in Les Misérables.
This is pretty much what I feel like after reading Victor Hugo's eighteen chapters about Waterloo in Les Misérables.
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I find the force of Hugo's nerdosity more endearing than not, but that may be because I haven't reread the book in almost twenty years.
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I'm also reading an edition that took two chapters out of the book and put them in an appendix at the end because the translator felt that they had no real bearing on anything in the story, which makes me wonder about them. I don't know which chapters they are, though.
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And when you consider how many expository digressions Hugo goes off on, the fact that only two chapters out of 365 are actually irrelevant is pretty impressive.
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About the number of chapters, I can imagine a family reading the book like Laura Ingalls Wilder's family did when she was a girl, gathered around and one person reading while the rest worked on sewing or other hand-worked items. The chapters are short enough not to overwhelm someone reading out loud, and it'd be finished in a year.
And then I think about the ZOMG Fantine's a PROSTITUTE! bit, and his paragraphs-long discussion of how "Shit!" turns out to be the noblest word ever said!! and how they'd spend almost 3 weeks on Waterloo alone, and I think perhaps it wasn't typical light family reading during the Victorian era after all.
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I'm not sure if I read an abridged translation or not, although given that it was (I think) 1600 pages long...but I read close to half of it on the flight from the USA to Korea, so my memory is a little hazy.
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I brought The Hunchback of Notre Dame to read on the airplane to the UK when I went to study abroad in Wales, because my roommate at the time had taken a literature seminar in which she read it, and reported to me beforehand that the prof said that hunchback was the sort of novel where you'd be reading bits of it out to your roommates. And it was, because she kept reading bits out it out to us.
I didn't read it on the plane, though--it was right after the Texas oil bust, and so the plane was mostly empty and I was able to grad a row of 3 seats, stretch out, and sleep for most of the journey, something that's neither happened before nor since. I read it later in the semester, when I was seriously bored and didn't want to walk down to the town center to get more books from the library there (the school's library didn't have a whole lot of popular-reading stuff).
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(Although I sort of want a t-shirt proclaiming that I survived Waterloo!)
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