Les Miserables (Penguin Classics) Paperback – April 29, 1982

Thank God I got the Kindle version for my Kindle Keyboard 3G. I read through 12% of the book before wondering 'how long will it take me to finish!!?". So I measured my reading speed pages-per-minute and estimated the total reading time for the entire book to be 64 hours. Seriously. So I took a different approach: I would read for an hour or two, then when fatigue started setting in, I pressed the "shift-sym" keyboard shortcut to activate text-to-speech, and just sat back or laid in bed while the kindle AI voice read it to me. This book famously takes place in France, and a lot of the names of people / places / streets are in French, so it's nice having the AI effortlessly pronounce them. My favorite was hearing it pronounce "Champs-Élysées" over and over again. It was pleasant, almost hypnotizing. Text-to-Speech allowed me to focus on the incredible story and not hassle through the pronunciations. Victor Hugo goes off on many tangents, such as 30+ page histories of the battle of waterloo, and the construction of the sewer system in Paris. It's quite fascinating and adds much to the story. There are many nuanced scenes that I continually go back to in my head, like the back passages behind the court room for transporting lawyers, and the one for transporting the criminals. And the ideas of whether a person can ever redeem themselves in society, contrasted with the situation that society is often times a poor judge of how to redeem oneself, and whether they should be deserving of redemption. It is an honest critique of criminal justice that is probably as relevant today as it was then.My understanding is that this "penguin classics" version has a better translation than the "free" version going around on the internet. It you're going to devote ~64 hours to an experience of life and death in old France, best put in a few bucks to get the best translation possible. For today's generation, the length of the story can be a bit jarring and leaves you wondering "will this story ever end?" I say this book is not at all to be treated as a story. It's not a television show. It's not a movie. It's not a musical. Les Miserables is an EXPERIENCE. So get the good version on Kindle, and have the AI voice continue the reading when fatigue starts to set in.

How can you leave anything less than 5 stars on the Norman Denny translation of Les Misérables? unless...unless! you own a paperback copy of the Penguin Classic and wanted to used said copy as a working copy that you could underline, mark up, and make notes in the margin and then have this "illustrated" hard backed copy with hopefully slightly better paper than the paperback's newspaper-like quality to have on the shelve to revisit.The illustrations? Well, there is a silhouette of a bird on the title page and there is the cover art - and that's it for that. The paper quality is no better than the paperback version.I'm not sending it back because it was a good deal and finding the Norman Denny translation is difficult (I'm still searching for an e-book version.) So, thank goodness for the quality of the author. I have a feeling that like Cervantes Don Quixote, I will be perpetually re-reading this incredible work.

I'm 400 pages through so far, and love this book. I have never seen the musical, or any of the movies, heard any of the music, or really know anything about the story. To be honest, I didn't even know it was a book until a friend mentioned that it was in his top 10 of favorite books of all time! Coming from him, who is quite a manly dude, warranted an investigation by my part.I'll continue to update this review as I read the book, but keep in mind it is a THICK read, covering around 1200 pages or so. Much of it is ancillary information that didn't really add too much to the story (yet?), as in there was about 100 pages or so talking in great detail about the battle of Waterloo; information I could have gotten from a history book. However the story is compelling, well written, and you become almost instantly attached to the main characters, pulling for them, hoping for them, really yearning for them to do the right things and to overcome.One of my favorite characters in the book was the Bishop of Digne, who apparently is barely mentioned in the musical or movie. The book provides a wealth of background on his character, which, in talking to diehard fans of this story, greatly entertained them. So even if you're seen the musical, the movie, or know the basic story, I'd recommend reading it due to all of the extra stuff in the story that didn't make the musical.