troisoiseaux | Entries tagged with les miserables

I've finished Les Misérables!!!! This novel has meant so much to me for so many years— as I've said, I genuinely don't know who I'd be if I hadn't read it at 13 (quite possibly, not pursuing my current career path?)— and it was interesting to re-read it both overlaid with the palimpsest of what I thought about a given scene/character/etc. on prior reads, and through the fresh eyes of reading with an intention of taking notes/keeping a reading journal about it: it made me pay closer attention to the ways it "echoed," and certain patterns emerged or imagery (gardens, drowning) repeated. Plus, I've enjoyed my discussions with everyone in the comments so much. <3

( Thoughts on 5.2-5.9 )

In which the people of Paris do not rise up, and the barricade falls :(

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Current Music: I Will Follow You Into The Dark - Death Cab For Cutie

Read Die Upon A Kiss by Barbara Hambly, one of her Benjamin January mysteries set in 1830s New Orleans. This one is actually less of a murder mystery than a "who keeps trying to murder the members of an opera troupe?" mystery, and to be honest, the mystery wasn't the most interesting part*— I was much more invested in the story as it pertained to reoccurring characters like January, his sister Dominique, and his love interest Rose, and all the details about early 19th century opera (did you know that dancing en pointe was originally done with wires???) and Italian nationalism circa the 1830s.

( One plot point was SUPER weird though )

Read through 4.14 in Les Mis— halfway through the events of the June Rebellion of 1832— and oh, Victor Hugo, we're really in it now.

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Read through 4.9 in Les Mis— I know, I'm posting updates in ever-shorter intervals, but I wanted to write these thoughts down before I get to the barricade chapters.

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Read Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi, a "novel in interlocking stories" centered around a group of women who met as students at an all-girls boarding school in Nigeria in the 1980s, but it spans generations and continents, from a story set in the 1890s-1920s to one— the story that's going to stick with me, out of all of them— set in 2050. (Ogunyemi's vision of 2050 involves a theocratic Nigeria and a U.S. where hospitals have their own debtor's prisons, which, oof.)

Read through 4.7 in Les Mis: Marius and Cosette HAVE FINALLY MET, the Thénardiers continue to be terrible parents, there's a prison break, and Victor Hugo has a lot of thoughts about argot.

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Read Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, an "eco-thriller" set in contemporary (late 2010s/pre-pandemic) New Zealand: a collective of "guerrilla gardeners" appears to find an unlikely ally in a doomsday-prepping American tech billionaire, but ends up entangled in a spider's web of half-truths and hidden motivations and straight-up conspiracies, with devastating consequences. I liked that the plot was driven by how, to the characters, it was basically a puzzle that no one had all of the same pieces to— characters would make decisions based on patchy information, which fed into another character's assumptions about their motives/plans, and so on, in - to wildly mix metaphors - a narrative Rube Goldberg machine with a roller coaster of a final act.

In Les Mis, I've read through 4.2: Marius and Cosette still have not actually met, and the winds of revolution are stirring.

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Current Music: I Was A Teenage Anarchist - Against Me!

I've read through 3.8 in Les Mis— I'm over halfway through! Marius has fallen in love with Cosette from afar and is being a total doofus about it; Hugo has introduced Éponine (tragic darling of my heart) and narrative coincidence has thrown together four people who had more or less given up on trying to actively track down or avoid at least one of the others.

Read Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones: a family of traveling musicians ends up on the wrong side of a despotic earl when they take on a mysterious young passenger. I picked this up after (and really, because of) learning about an absolutely bonkers plot point, which impacted my view of certain characters from the beginning, but overall, it was quite good— I was reminded of The Dark Lord of Derkholm, especially in its child's-eye view of a grim political situation, although it was set in a different sort of secondary fantasy world.

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Re-read Nona the Ninth alongside a friend who was reading it for the first time; I can say that my feeling of "first third was a slog" on read #2 was 100% a matter of not being in the right mood for it, because I was back to vibing with it this time.

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In Les Mis, I've read through 3.4, in which Hugo makes the mistake of introducing nine guys in their 20s with just enough characterization to accidentally spawn one of the most insufferable fandoms of the 21st century. I'd braced myself for embarrassed-to-defensive nostalgia, so I was rather surprised to instead feel genuinely delighted to re-encounter Les Amis de l'ABC.

In Les Mis, read 2.8 - in which Valjean sneaks out of a convent by being buried alive, in order to re-enter it legitimately, which is such a comedy of errors: the conversation between Fauchelevent and the prioress ("I must say!" "You must say what?"); the wrench in the escape plan when it turns out there's a new gravedigger, much less easily distracted than the one they planned for - through 3.3, the intergenerational drama of the Gillenormand-Pontmercy family. (I can't believe I forgot to include Georges Pontmercy on the gardening = goodness list.) In between is the Gamin (And Paris) Digression, which is probably my favorite of the digressions.

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Listened to episodes 190-200 - the final "act" - of The Magnus Archives. I skipped episodes 163-189 because I am a total weenie, and I wasn't a huge fan of the shift ( in focus ) in season 5, but #190 ended up being a good place to dip back in: ( ... ) EXTREMELY satisfying ending, in terms of narrative threads pulled and beats hit.

In Les Mis, Valjean has rescued Cosette from the Thénardiers, and they're on the lam in Paris.

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Read Unto The Godless What Little Remains by Mário Coelho, a cyberpunk novella set in a near-future Lisbon, Portugal, where a massive data breach years earlier made everything everyone had ever posted, searched, or sent online publicly available, and body modification can involve re-coding your DNA or injecting new personality traits, and AI are basically gods: one of which (think Siri, made sentient and omniscient) has fallen in love with a human and one of which (a crime surveillance AI that acts through mind-controlled human agents) wants to take that guy down. As usual with novellas, I wish it was longer— I was particularly interested in Stevly, an agent of the aforementioned surveillance AI— but Coelho makes effective use of ~100 pages, especially in building up the story's details through a non-linear narrative structure.

Read An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy, a neo-noir set in mid-'00s New York City, a time and place that Murphy evokes with a flâneur's eye for detail; a corporate lawyer turned freelance solver-of-problems is drawn into a world of antique books and corrupt real estate deals when (what else?) a beautiful woman shows up with a story about a theft by her soon-to-be-ex-husband, an encounter - and job - that isn't what it appears to be. An ambling, atmospheric novel.

In Les Mis, read through 1.8; I really, really love 1.7, in which Valjean is thrown a lifeline by the universe and into turmoil over whether he could live with himself for taking it.

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Read Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore 1994-2007 by Dan Ozzi, which was a fun read, since many of the bands profiled - each chapter is about a different band's first album with a major label - were the soundtrack of my teenage years: Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Against Me!, Blink-182, Jimmy Eat World. (..."teenage years," I say, as if I don't still listen to all of these bands.)

In Les Mis, I've read Vol. I, Books 3-6, which is to say: through the introductions to Fantine, the Thénardiers, and the people and events of Montreuil-sur-mer circa 1821-23.

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Read Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, a retelling of Cupid and Psyche that I discovered via

moon_custafer's tags on this Tumblr post, and I was not disappointed. If I had loved this book less, I would be able to talk about it more; as it is, I can only say that it gripped my heart, dug in its nails, and twisted. I have a lot of feelings about the narrator, Orual— she is an unreliable narrator and a fantastically layered, flawed, compelling character who defies gender roles and it genuinely boggles my mind that Clive Staples Lewis, of all people, came up with her and wrote her with such empathy.

Currently reading Exiled From Camelot by Cherith Baldry, which you might know as The One with the Extremely Woobie Kay (per previous and very entertaining reviews by

osprey_archer [x],

littlerhymes [x], and

skygiants [x]). I am ten chapters in and the woobie levels are, in fact, critical. Contrary to expectations, the fact I grew up reading Baldry's pseudonymous contributions to the Warrior Cats series is making this a more rather than less embarrassing reading experience.

In Les Mis, I'm through the introduction of Jean Valjean. The only thing bleaker than Valjean's backstory is that it's something still instantly recognizable— overlong sentencing, underpaid prison labor, housing and employment discrimination against formerly incarcerated people— rather than some long-ago historical horror. (Relatedly, it's intriguing that I can think of three separate novels from the mid-1800s featuring a character who was imprisoned in France for 14-19 years.) I'm already sad to have seen the last of Bishop Myriel; I will miss his surprisingly sly sense of humor (e.g., the whole "oh, yes, I found the basket! ohhhh, you were looking for the stuff that was in it?" exchange). I've seen a few different film adaptions, but I can't remember if the Petit Gervais scene is typically included...? (I don't think it's in the musical?) It's such a significant moment! I think the point of Bishop Myriel as a character is to illustrate how being a good person takes conscious action, and in following the candlestick scene with Petit Gervais, Valjean is faced with the immediate impact of conscious kindness vs. unconscious unkindness, and makes a choice about how he's going to live his life going forward— it's not just that he's given a second chance at freedom and automatically resolves to be a good person henceforth.

Read The King Must Die by Mary Renault, the first book in a duology retelling the myth of the Greek hero Theseus; this one covers the story up through his return to Athens after slaying the Minotaur. I enjoyed it! It had the feel of a fantasy adventure novel, although it was less fantastic than the original myth— ( basically, the Minotaur is a metaphor? ) There was a certain amount of *waves at Mary Renault*-ness, but for long stretches of the book, I honestly forgot that she was the author; the climax features one of the best action scenes I can remember reading.

Read Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O'Reilly, a heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny memoir about growing up in Northern Ireland as the ninth of eleven (!) children, raised by a single father after his mother's death when he was five. Best family memoir I've read since Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy.

I've decided that my reading goal for 2023 is to re-read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, which is probably my all-time favorite book and certainly the most influential; I genuinely don't know who I'd be if I hadn't read this book when I was 13. Having started on January 1st, I'm still on the introduction to Bishop Myriel. Three sentences into Les Mis, Hugo warns that the subsequent multiple chapters dedicated to Myriel "in no way concerns our story," and I feel like people tend to believe him, so I find myself newly struck by the significance of starting his book about the myriad cruelties of society with a portrait of one man living a life of almost ineffable kindness. It also occurs to me that Hugo uses gardening as a shorthand for goodness— off the top of my head, I can think of Myriel, Valjean as a gardener at the convent, and Mabeuf?