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It's a long way from Wednesday
Jun. 11th, 2021 09:12 amYet I still have some feelings about Les Misérables. Here are a few.
1. This book is a trap. The chapters are short, so I keep thinking, "One more won't hurt!" but the book is neverending. Usually when I get stuck in a short-chapter trap, I lose a little sleep and it's over in a few days, but this book never ends.
2. There are so many ludicrous coincidences that they very quickly cease to be ludicrous and start functioning more like a rhyme scheme than a traditional plot.
3. When I was a teenager, before I read the book for the first time but after my middle-school choir did "Castle on a Cloud," I thought it was a terrific bit of moral sophistication on my part to be annoyed that someone had taken this extremely important srs realist book about the plight of the poor and made a trashy singing-dancing extravaganza out of it for filthy lucre. I could not have been more wrong about the nature of Les Misérables-the-book, which is practically a musical already.
( Spoilers ahoy! )
7. Writers who are deeply concerned with how little (literal) shit there is in everyone else's literature will always have a place in my heart.
That's about all I can report on this week, except that I found this book during an ill-advised procrastination jag. It's a collection of satirical suffrage verses from 1915, and it's just a basket of gems.
1. This book is a trap. The chapters are short, so I keep thinking, "One more won't hurt!" but the book is neverending. Usually when I get stuck in a short-chapter trap, I lose a little sleep and it's over in a few days, but this book never ends.
2. There are so many ludicrous coincidences that they very quickly cease to be ludicrous and start functioning more like a rhyme scheme than a traditional plot.
3. When I was a teenager, before I read the book for the first time but after my middle-school choir did "Castle on a Cloud," I thought it was a terrific bit of moral sophistication on my part to be annoyed that someone had taken this extremely important srs realist book about the plight of the poor and made a trashy singing-dancing extravaganza out of it for filthy lucre. I could not have been more wrong about the nature of Les Misérables-the-book, which is practically a musical already.
( Spoilers ahoy! )
7. Writers who are deeply concerned with how little (literal) shit there is in everyone else's literature will always have a place in my heart.
That's about all I can report on this week, except that I found this book during an ill-advised procrastination jag. It's a collection of satirical suffrage verses from 1915, and it's just a basket of gems.
