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.

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.

Such an amazing story. So beautiful!

I bought this Norman Denny translation in January 2013. Originally, I'd gotten the Isabel F. Hapgood translation (the one with the silhouette of a reading girl surrounded by cat-tails) on my Kindle. However, the spaces between paragraphs were too wide, so I had to flip pages quite often. This got quite annoying after 450 pages. Also, the language in the Kindle edition was a little difficult to understand, and there were random accent marks on random words -- the editing wasn't the best.However, the Norman Denny translation's easy to understand (the English is the English we speak in the 21st Century, and not what was spoken in the 19th Century). There might have been some spelling or grammatical errors, but far less than in the Kindle edition. While I was reading the Kindle edition, I kept on glancing at the percentage metre to see when I would hit the next percent. Because it was a Kindle e-book, I could only rely on the percentage metre to see how far I was in the book. Also, when I got to one of those useless rants about social injustice, I kept on having to hit the "Go To" button to go to the Table of Contents and see how many more chapters I had to endure of the boring stuff. With the hard-copy book, I could just flip through the book until I found the next chapter.This translation in itself's fine, but the content isn't. First, there are the useless rants about social injustice that nobody really cares about. Victor Hugo might have been right about the social issues in the 1860's, but why would he put them in a romance novel? He ought to have taken all his rants from Les Mis and put them in separate essays. Gladly, according to what one of my friends who read this Les Mis translation said, Norman Denny gets rid of at least 50 pages of Hugo's rants.Second, in Part I, Book I ("An Upright Man"), Hugo dedicates the first 50 pages of his great masterpiece to talking about the daily life and good deeds of the extremely nice Bishop of Digne. Although the Bishop figures in only 100 pages of the 1400 page book, Hugo describes him the most. Alright, we get the point that the Bishop's the nicest bloke in the world!Third, Hugo dedicates another 50 pages to an epic description of the June 1815 Battle of Waterloo. He finally gets to some story in the last two pages. Hugo mentions places such as Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Braine-l'Alleud, Mont-Saint-Jean, Genappe, Nivelles, etc. that nobody knows about. All those locations are somewhere in southern Belgium and northern France, but only locals would know the places. As these locations figure quite prominently in Part II, Book I ("Waterloo"), it's quite difficult trying to understand the Battle of Waterloo if you don't know where any of the locations are. If locations aren't confusing enough, Hugo mentions people such as Blücher, the Prince of Orange, Chassé, Halkett, Mitchell, Somerset, etc. that nobody knows about. Personally, the only names I recognised in "Waterloo" were "the Duke of Wellington" and "Napoleon". Because the Battle of Waterloo only occurred about 50 years after Les Mis was first published, Hugo expects his audience to know who Blücher, the Prince of Orange, Chassé, etc. were. However, it's almost 200 years after the Battle of Waterloo, and people only recognise the names of the two principal generals/commanders -- the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Even so, some people only know who Napoleon is, and not the Duke of Wellington. I read "Waterloo" on my Kindle, so I kept on going to the Table of Contents and looking at all the chapters in "Waterloo" to see how much longer I had to endure it.Fourth, in Part II, Book VI ("Le Petit-Picus"), Hugo uses 30 pages to explain the history of the Petit-Picus convent. Seriously? The Petit-Picus convent only figures in about 100 pages out of 1400 pages. The convent's also extinct -- it died about 150 years ago.Fifth, in Part II, Book VII ("The Convent as an Abstract Idea"), 15 pages are dedicated to explaining as to why a convent is actually a prison. Why doesn't Victor Hugo just put all that rubbish in another essay, instead of in Les Mis?Sixth, the name of Part IV, Book I ("A Few Pages of History") is a serious misnomer. Thirty-four pages of history isn't considered "a few pages of history".Seventh, in Part IV, Book VII ("Argot"), 20 pages are used to talk about slang. Evidently, the slang of the 1830's is completely different from the slang of the 2010's. So why can't Victor Hugo get rid of all that rubbish?Eighth, in Part V, Book II ("The Entrails of the Monster"), Hugo uses 20 pages to describe the Paris sewers. Although the sewers might have some prominence, overall, they're not that important.I made the mistake of reading "An Upright Man", "Waterloo", "Le Petit-Picus", "The Convent as an Abstract Idea", "A Few Pages of History", and "The Entrails of the Monster". Fortunately, I didn't read "Argot". Whenever I was reading these seven sections, I kept on thinking, "Mr. Hugo, can we PLEASE get on with the story?". PLEASE DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF READING THESE SEVEN SECTIONS. THEY ARE A WASTE OF YOUR TIME. YOU WILL REGRET IT IF YOU DO! Otherwise, read everything else. Les Mis is actually quite good -- just not the eight sections.The title of this review is "Monsieur Gillenormand Lives", because my favourite character in Les Mis is Monsieur Gillenormand, the 90-year-old grandfather of Marius Pontmercy, one of the main characters. I think Norman Denny's representation of Monsieur Gillenormand is marvelous. Monsieur Gillenormand was the only character who made me laugh in a serious book. My second favourite character was Grantaire, who was quite comical as well, but not as much as Monsieur Gillenormand.

Recently, I bought this for my son for Christmas cause he starred in Les Miserables and he didn’t even own the book so I highly recommend good quality and it looks great in your library