6 Reasons Why You Should Read Les Miserables
Admit it. You’ve always wanted to read Les Miserables.
You’ve seen the musical. Seen the movie too.
You might own the book. Maybe the gray paperback version with a young Cosette on the cover?
In the 90s, when excitement about Les Mis on Broadway was at its peak, everyone had that gray paperback version of the book.
In the 90s I saw that gray paperback everywhere I went. It was the thickest spine on every bookshelf, and it was always, always pristine and brand new with nary a wrinkle on the spine.
Which brings us to the first reason you should read the book.
1. Every bookish person aspires to read Les Mis, but hardly anyone does.
We will get to the meat of the novel later in the list, and yes, it really is a profound reading experience that’s worth your time even if you never tell a soul you read it…
But we all know that part of the fun of the classics is talking about them. Completing them. Collecting the experiences of reading them.
People who finish the great books, particularly the massive tomes of 19th century lit, haven’t just bettered themselves as people. They have also proven their mettle. As soon as you read Les Miserables, you graduate from the massive crowd of people who aspire to read the book into the much more exclusive club of people who actually did it.
And joining that club comes with benefits, which leads us to #2.
2. Reading Les Mis will make you appreciate the musical even more.
Among some fans of the book, you will find a lukewarm reception to the musical, but not here. I adore that show. I admire the beauty of its music, the raw emotional power of the story it tells, and the skill with which the book was adapted.
And I like it even better now that I’ve read the book.
Quick example: If you’re a fan of the musical, you’ll quickly recognize these lyrics.
He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came
Those lyrics from I Dreamed a Dream are concise and poignant, and they serve to condense an entire backstory into four lines. Those four lines from the show are, in the book, more than a hundred pages of story about young Fantine, a tragic character whose life goes awry when a selfish prick flees after he gets her pregnant.
It’s a brutal story to read, and it sticks with you. After you read Les Mis, you feel like you know Fantine, and her song from the show, I Dreamed A Dream, becomes many orders of magnitude more potent.
And it’s not just Fantine. Every character you love from the show gets a lengthy, detailed treatment in the book. Eponine has a massive story you never see in the show. The revolutionaries who build the barricade all have names and histories and personalities in the novel. The Thenardiers become more than simple comic relief. Javert came to life so spectacularly for me that he got his own essay.
Boublil and Schonberg (writers of Les Mis the musical) deeply loved this novel. I know this not because I’ve ever seen an interview where they said so, but because I can feel that love in the way this show connects to the story. You will too, after you’ve read the book.
3. Reading Les Miserables is the cure for so much of what ails us in the 21st century.
We’re only beginning to realize how detrimental social media and our phones in general are to our habits of mind. Shorter attention spans, inability to think as deeply or creatively, even measurably lower IQ just when our phone is in the room!
But social media and smart phones are only part of the problem. In the 21st century, the market to grab someone’s attention is so competitive that content creators have grown skilled at doing all the mental work for you. We, the content creators of the world, organize information in easily digestible chunks. We mix text with images and video. Our books have shorter chapters. Our chapters have shorter paragraphs.
The very idea of what fiction can and should do in the 21st century is different than when Hugo wrote Les Miserables. In today’s world, a story must be a pageturner in order to hold onto a reader when so many electrical devices are calling. Challenging fiction, the kind that requires you, the reader, to work, is a hard sell these days, and that’s not good for any of us because your brain is a muscle that needs hard work in order to stay sharp.
The degradation of our cognitive capacity and habits of mind in the Age of Distraction is real. See here, here, here, and here.
But with these uniquely 21st century challenges come a uniquely 21st century opportunity. In a world where distractive technology destroys our ability to focus, simply developing the ability to concentrate deeply becomes a kind of super power, and research shows that the best the way to improve your concentration is to practice.
Reading challenging, thoughtful, deeply considered literature like Les Miserables is one very effective way to practice.
Les Miserables is a timeless story mixed with challenging history lessons and philosophical musings. For some readers, those latter parts (the boring parts) are a turnoff and a reason to skip the book.
For you, they should be just the opposite. You should read Les Miserables precisely because it is so much harder than the latest thriller on the bestseller list.
You should read it because it will not only make you a better reader, but a smarter, more capable thinker.
4. Every page is packed with profound ideas expressed in beautiful language.
All the great classics of literature are quotable, but few are as quotable as Les Miserables. Even after translation out of its native language, the ideas in this book are so potent you will find yourself constantly stopping just to ponder them.
Here’s a quote from Les Mis for when you’re frustrated or disappointed: “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing more.”
And here’s one for when you’re putting love and kindness out into the world and not getting it back: “You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it.”
This quote is full of wisdom about the mindset of someone whose life isn’t going to plan: “People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.”
This truth bomb is doubly poignant because, hidden within it is a plea for you to forgive those who have done wrong: “Despair is surrounded by fragile walls which all open into vice or crime.”
This is one to read to yourself every morning before you head off to work: “Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.”
Sometimes Hugo speaks in specifics about 19th century France but you realize he’s talking about principles that absolutely apply to 21st century America. “The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.”
And sometimes, many times, Hugo will make you thankful that you get to spend so many hours in his head, because it’s a thoughtful, fascinating place. “Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?”
If you feel like some of the ideas in those quotes are particularly apt in the 21st century, you’re not alone, which brings us to our next reason to read the book.
5. Les Miserables is incredibly relevant in our hyper partisan political environment.
These days you turn on the TV, or get on your Facebook feed, and you wonder how it got so bad so fast. A wave of angry division is spreading across the globe, and in its wake, you feel like you don’t recognize the country where you live or the friends you grew up with. You don’t know how it came to be that we all landed on different tribes and teams, but you can’t believe that you were friends with those jerks who are now playing for the wrong team.
You’re not alone.
If it feels like malevolent spirits appeared one night and infected half the populace in your country, the half that’s not on your team, you’re not alone.
If you feel like Roddy Piper looking through the alien sunglasses for the first time, or a Sneetch who just fell out of Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s Star-Off machine, you’re not alone.
When I read Les Miserables in 21st century America I felt an intense connection to everyone who has ever struggled to carry on with normal life in abnormal times. Les Mis is about people who struggle, who succeed, who fail, who love, who want, and the thread that connects them all is the revolutionary fever that surrounds them.
Because Les Mis is so expansive and well-written, it affords you a chance to live a life, Jean Valjean’s entire adult life, in your imagination. It’s a life of forgiveness and redemption amidst a backdrop of political turmoil that makes the 21st century look tame in comparison. Reading it connects you to the wisdom of a great thinker who’s seen times like these before. It will remind you that there are periods of relative peace and relative chaos, and we don’t get to choose which period we live in. We only get to choose how we live.
This brings us to the final and most important reason to read Les Miserables.
6. Reading Les Miserables can be a life-changing experience.
I can’t promise you that your experience will be the same as mine. I can’t even promise you that you’ll get past the Waterloo section of the novel, which is just the first of many challenging digressions in this book.
But I can tell you that, for me, reading Les Miserables was a profound experience.
The book opens in the year 1815 with Monseignor Charles Francois Bienvenu Myreil, the Bishop of Digne.
Yes, the Bishop is the first character we meet in the book. Not Jean Valjean. Not the prison. No one sings, “Look Down.” No Prisoner 24601 on stage.
Not yet.
The book starts with the Bishop because it is the Bishop who sets this story in motion.
“Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.”
If you’ve seen the musical you know that a recently released prisoner named Jean Valjean, struggling and homeless, accepts refuge in a Bishop’s house and repays the kindness by stealing the Bishop’s silver. You also know, maybe you can see the moment on the stage in your mind’s eye, that police capture Valjean and bring him back to the Bishop’s home.
And then the Bishop, knowing that Valjean is in desperate need of an act of mercy, tells the police, He didn’t steal that silver, I gave it to him.
That one act of kindness sets in motion a thousand pages of magnificent story, and Valjean’s role throughout the story is to bring kindess and beauty into the world.
To repay the favor that the Bishop paid to him.
You should read Les Miserables because the story is about the power of a single act of kindness.
It’s one thing for me to tell you to be kind and forgiving. It’s another thing entirely for me to give you a fully immersive world of truth that shows you how one act of love can set in motion a chain of positive events that continue to bring good into the world years or even lifetimes after the act is done.
What a treasure. What an incredible treasure Victor Hugo gave to the world with this book.
Spencer Baum is the author of 7 novels.
