Abebooks has ten reasons for not getting around to certain books. About #4, I’ve been listening to Les Miserables for months in order to get through it. Some of the digressions from the storyline are maddening.
Abebooks has ten reasons for not getting around to certain books. About #4, I’ve been listening to Les Miserables for months in order to get through it. Some of the digressions from the storyline are maddening.
Listening? Wow! I read the book one summer years ago. Best summer reading I have ever done. It is a story and they are characters I truly love.
I do love the story, but when Hugo stopped to say I needed to understand the history of the convent before I could hear the story within it, my interest waned. Worse than that, when he threw out handfuls of details about Marius’ friends, all of whom are minor characters, I couldn’t keep up. I had to skip ahead, despite the occasional quotable sentence. I just couldn’t keep the characters straight.
I did have to keep looking back while reading that one–now, who was that? What were they doing? I just couldn’t remember. I need a chart.
I do agree with the Abe Books article author–anything with the ring of “should read” always stays at the bottom of the stack…
For me the most memorable sidetrack in Les Miserables was that hundred pages spent examining the battle of Waterloo because one minor character had been affected by the battle in a way that slightly affected the storyline.
I currently have the Moby Dick book on cassette from the library out in the car. Melville suffers from the same affinity for lengthy explanations of peripheral details. I remember hating the book when I first read it 20 years ago. But I didn’t see anything more appealing in the Books On Cassette section when I was at the library a couple of weeks ago. Since I much prefer a book on cassette to anything on the radio while I’m driving around, I checked it out. Now I’m discovering new reasons to dislike Moby Dick.