Les Misérables
In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.
Stats for nerds
35recommend
115mentions
97people
2009–2026years
37% recommend59% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I read The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and I loved both of them, can recommend.
Seveneves is an amazing book, just make sure you skip the last part.
If you are into history I can recommend The last days of the Incas by Kim MaqQuarrie, it's just an insanely interesting description on how the Incas was conquered, it feels like you're there man.
If you like evolutionary biology/phsycology then check out The Red Queen - Sex and the evolution of human Nature by Matt Ridley.
- >The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Amazing books....
+100
- It feels inappropriate for a teacher of English literature to be dismissing the western canon as a bunch of old white men droning on about shit no one cares about. If that's her attitude, her students are either going to pick it up themselves, or worse, if they've been reading from a young age and happen to actually love and enjoy the classics, they'll feel dismissed themselves as if their tastes are invalid in the modern era.
A curriculum should update over time, but there's plenty of value in having a canon. It's a shared point of reference to create a common culture. Fashions, music, television to streaming video or whatever, might all change rapidly, but at least give parents and children something they're both familiar with. Beyond that, it can in and of itself create the kind of urbane cosmopolitan widening of one's circle of appreciation and belonging she seems to want kids to experience. Reading old material teaches you that there actually are common elements to all human experience. Even old white guys from hundreds of years ago had the same hopes, fears, desires, and bodily experiences you have. We're not so different from each other, let alone fully defined by our skin color and century of origin to the point that alien cultures can never have any hope of appreciating and empathizing with each other. Les Miserables is about inequality, poverty, abuses of law enforcement, overcoming modest beginnings to achieve great things, giving back to the less fortunate. How the fuck are these not relevant modern topics you'd want children to read about? Let them know these are not new concerns and even old white men might be more progressive and empathetic than you assume based purely on their age and skin color.
- > Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system
This is entirely the reason to read them. Literature is partly about opening up and expanding your perspectives, and challenging the reader. If you simply surround yourself in what’s comfortable and familiar you’re not exploring the depth of the human experience.
And Hugo’s whole theme is about injustice and inequality. What it means to live in a society without sanitation, something that still exists in large swathes of the world. These are themes that continue to resonate. Just because he was a “old white man” does not negate the value of his literature. Instead this article reads as racists and ageist.
So thanks to the Atlantic for continuing to bring up difficult subjects that make certain groups unhappy because they need to be pried from their insulated and privileged perspectives.
As Hugo so eloquently writes:
As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century — man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness — are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless. - Perhaps Victor Hugo Les Miserables, its like so vast, like a sea.
- I used to believe that games were an art form - but I just can't get behind them being completely on par with books, etc.
The writing is often so terrible... I wish I could think of a single video game that touched me like The Brothers Karamazov or Les Miserables.
