les miserables

October 9, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the longest books we’ve ever read. I know a lot of readers find gigantic books kind of unwieldy, but I actually quite like doorstops! Some of them have been amazing, some less so, but here are ten of the longest ones I’ve made it through (if one author has multiple entries, I’m going with the longest one for that author)!

A Suitable Boy: This will almost certainly be the longest book I ever read because it’s looooong, y’all. I spent weeks reading it during a summer in college. It was really good and I want to read it again but that is a COMMITMENT.

Les Miserables: I know a lot of people complain about the extended digressions into things like the history of the sewer system in Paris, but I actually really liked the whole thing!

War and Peace: It’s so long but it’s soooo good! The size can be intimidating but once you get started it really draws you in.

A Storm of Swords: The longest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series! All of these books are super long, and this one is actually my favorite but it took me until my second try to actually get all the way through it.

Gone With The Wind: In the ultimate bookish heresy, the movie is better. The subplots that got cut were worth excising for a still-sprawling but more focused narrative.

The Executioner’s Song: I still maintain that there’s a very good 600 page book inside this 1000+ pager about the first person executed after the death penalty was re-instituted in the United States but as is it’s just too bloated to really recommend

Don Quixote: I hated this book so much.

The Cider House Rules: The movie inspired me to pick this one up, and though I haven’t read it again in ages I want to someday because it’s really good.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra: I read this (and quite a bit of other Margaret George) in high school, and I feel like I liked it? My memories of it are vaguely positive anyways.

Shantaram: I read this fairly recently, and after about page 200 it was hate-reading. For the next 700+ pages.

January 30, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Can’t Believe I Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books we can’t believe we read. Since we’ve got a topic coming up later that’s about books we read but hated, I’m going to use this one as a bragging opportunity for the giant books I’ve managed to conquer.

A Suitable Boy: This book took me the better part of an entire summer in college because it’s enormous. And it was really good and I learned a bunch of things about India but holy wow I can’t believe I made it through it because it seriously took months.

War and Peace: You never have to ask if someone’s read War and Peace, because if they have, they’ll tell you. Also please don’t let this book’s size deter you, it’s great and moves much more quickly than you think it will (it will still take a long time though).

The Executioner’s Song: This 1000+ pager is considered a masterpiece of true crime and while I didn’t like it as much as all that, I read the whole thing, even the boring parts about the sale of the movie rights for the story while the guy was still alive.

Les Miserables: Another gigantic classic that I was kind of like “ughhhhh” about reading before I read it and then it turns out it’s fantastic! I do think having seen the movie helped so I had at least some vague idea of where the plot was going because there’s a lot going on here.

A Game of Thrones: I only started to read these books because of the show and they’re all huge (this one, the first, is actually one of the shorter ones) and they are amazing and I love them and re-read one every year.

I Know This Much Is True: This is a big, lifespan-crossing book about twin brothers, one of whom is mentally ill and the other of whom is not. It feels so much like the kind of book I should have loved, and it’s well-written but didn’t quite earn its length, for me.

The Cider House Rules: This was the first Irving I read (in high school, after I saw the movie), and honestly it’s still my favorite even though I’ve read several of his other books. Something about it really resonated with me.

Vanity Fair: I’m not always down for an unlikable lead character, especially when the page count is as long as this book’s is, and in fact when I tried to read it in high school I didn’t get too far. But when I read it a few years ago, I came to almost enjoy how awful Becky was…that kind of determination is interesting.

The Fountainhead: We all went through that Ayn Rand phase in high school, right?

Blonde: I remember this fictionalized take on Marilyn Monroe’s life by Joyce Carol Oates taking me forever to read and it turns out that’s because it’s over 700 pages long.

November 7, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Characters Worth Following

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we’re looking at characters that would make great leaders, so here are ten characters that I think would be worth following.

Hermione Granger (Harry Potter): The Harry Potter series would have been, like, one book long without Hermoine making sure Harry and Ron didn’t kill themselves by accident. She is smart, capable, and I would be more than happy to follow her wherever she went.

Lyra Belacqua (The Golden Compass): Lyra’s just one of those “natural leaders”…it’s no accident that when the Jordan College kids are fighting the townie kids, that it’s Lyra that leads them into battle. Her natural charisma is obvious even on the page.

Gandalf (The Fellowship of the Ring): When the Fellowship sets off on their quest, it’s the wizard that leads them…in part to quell arguments between the races about leadership, but also because he’s wise and thoughtful and anyone who’s beloved in Hobbiton is someone I’d be okay trailing behind.

Madeline Mackenzie (Big Little Lies): After reading this book (I still haven’t seen the show and I really need to!), I so appreciated Madeline’s take-charge attitude that I’d have happily joined her book club (or anything else she wanted me to).

Charles O’Keefe (A Wrinkle In Time): While Meg is my favorite character from this series, she’s too short-tempered to make a good leader. Leaders are most effective if they’re liked, and who wouldn’t like and line up behind Charles?

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): England in Austen’s time didn’t have a lot in the way of formal leadership roles for women, but clever Emma was clearly the queen bee of her social set, which is about as much as an upper-class lady could aspire to.

Mr. Wednesday (American Gods): There’s a reason he’s the one that goes on the journey to round up the old gods across the country…he’s the one that’s got the persuasiveness to get them to join up!

Achilles (Song of Achilles): He’s a strong, true, and fair commander of his troops, who wouldn’t want to follow him…and who would care that he’s gay, for that matter?

Ned Stark (A Game of Thrones): Noble, brave, and always doing the right thing, Ned is pretty much the platonic ideal of a hero and a worthy leader.

Jean Valjean (Les Miserables): He spends most of his life repenting for a criminal act by becoming selfless and kind and the kind of man who gets elected to be the mayor of his town.

October 3, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Crushes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is book boyfriends/girlfriends…you know, when you’re reading a book and get all swoony about one of the characters. This is a bit of a tough one, for me, because I don’t read a ton of books with a central romance (which tend to be the type of books that make you all swoony over characters), so I’m splitting it up: five boy crushes, and five girl crushes!

The Dudes:

Captain Wentworth (Persuasion): This was the first Austen I read, and the hero remains my favorite. He’s loyal and good-natured and big enough to forgive a foolish spurning means that even though she’s an “old maid” (at 27!), the love he and Anne have for each other is just delayed rather than denied and this book is great and so is he.

Kolya (City of Thieves): Rakish and high-spirited, Kolya tends to win over everyone he meets with his charm. Especially women, and it’s not hard to understand why: young and handsome and endearing tends to be an easy sell.

Charles O’Keefe (A Wrinkle In Time): This series is so amazing because it has such great characters: prickly Meg, self-possessed Charles Wallace, and brave, kind Charles, who is able to maintain his own stable goodness despite adverse circumstances. It’s easy to understand why Meg loves him and it’s hard not to love him a bit yourself.

Eric Northman (Dead To The World): This whole series has a rotating cast of love interests for Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone whose favorite isn’t Eric, particularly in the fourth book, where he’s lost his memory and imperiousness and he’s just a tall, handsome sweetheart.

Jean Valjean (Les Miserables): A man who recovers from some previous missteps to live virtuously and devote himself to the loving raising of a child who isn’t his? If that’s not dreamy to you, we have different ideas of what dreamy is.

The Ladies:

Sabriel (Sabriel): Smart and brave and with powerful magic, Sabriel is enchanting and one of those characters who you can never forget once you’ve experienced.

Yvaine (Stardust): An actual star, kidnapped by a young man named Tristan to be a present for the girl he pines for, Yvaine is sarcastic and witty and it is no surprise that Tristan eventually realizes that he’s actually in love with her after all, because she’s great.

Natasha Rostova (War and Peace): If you can read this book and not fall a little bit in love with Natasha, you’ve got a heart of stone. Her spirit is what holds this enormous epic together, and the way she ends up still doesn’t sit quite right with me.

Ellen Cherry Charles (Skinny Legs and All): Tom Robbins is a love-him-or-hate-him writer, and I tend to be in the former group. Ellen is a waitress who wants to be an artist, and her struggle to figure out her relationship with her husband and the world and herself and her pride and vulnerability make her a winning heroine.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones’s Diary): Bridget drinks too much, can’t stick to a diet and exercise plan, and speaks before she thinks. She is a delight and I want to be best friends.

September 5, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Took Me A Long Time To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Today’s given topic is books that took a long time to read, and to be honest, this is a list I struggled to put together because I generally read really fast. Even for books I don’t like, because I try to burn through them as quick as I can so I can move on to something better. That being said, there are definitely some books that I had to chip away at bit by bit, mostly because of length but sometimes because they were genuinely difficult.

War and Peace: This book took me about three weeks to read, because it is very very long. But there’s a reason it’s virtually always at the top of lists of best books: it’s really incredible. Natasha might be one of my favorite characters in literature. Very much worth the time investment.

Les Miserables: Another super-long epic. I’ve actually never seen the show, but I did see the (very hit and miss) movie before I read it, and honestly I think it helped to have some sort of idea of the general plotline because there are so many characters and so much story that without an idea of generally what was going on I’d have been discouraged. It’s also very good and worth the time.

Creative Mythology: This was the end of a four-book series that I’d found tiresome even after the first one but I’m both a completist and very stubborn. By the time I got around to this one, I was deeply and profoundly ready for the series to be over but they were really hard to slog through so it took weeeeeks.

A Suitable Boy: I read this the summer after my freshman year in college because my mom had a copy hanging around and it had always intrigued me. Another super super long one, this book actually taught me most of what I know about The Partition. I’d like to revisit this story one day when I have a LOT of spare time.

The Grapes of Wrath: This was the bane of my senior year of high school. I’m not much for Steinbeck and this is a lot of pages of Steinbeck. We had to keep these reading logs for each chapter, so I actually had to do a close read of every part of it and by the time I finished it I was so angry about reading it.

Vanity Fair: I’d made a stab at this in high school for fun and never was able to get into it, but a couple years ago I picked it up again and made it through. I usually have a hard time with books with unlikable protagonists, but once I decided that Becky’s scrapiness was actually kind of admirable I got around to enjoying it if not loving it.

A Storm of Swords: All of the A Song of Ice and Fire books are long, but the third volume was the only one that stymied me on my initial read-through. I got bored and actually had to start it over again after getting about 1/4 of the way through because I put it down for so long that I couldn’t remember what was going on. Once I made a second stab at it, it went really fast, but that first try was rough.

Don Quixote: I loathed this book so hard. It was all I could do to make myself spend just 20-30 minutes a day with it, so it went by slooooooowly.

The Divine Comedy: This is kind of cheating, because I read this three-part epic poem over the course of an entire semester in college. I loved it, don’t get me wrong, especially since taking the whole class gave me so much of the context behind it…well, most of it anyway. Paradiso was kind of weak, but the other two parts were great.

Wolf Hall: Once I got into it, I really liked it (and its sequel even more), but I had a hard time getting grounded in the way Hillary Mantel was telling her story. It’s one of those things that I’m glad I was able to push through until I got my head around, though, because it’s a great book.

July 19, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Set Outside The US

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: books set outside the US! I think a lot of us (or maybe just me?) tend to read fiction set within our own country…it’s just instantly familiar, there’s no learning curve. Thankfully I do sort my books on Goodreads by country setting, so I’m going to try to do no more than one from each country!

The Kite Runner (Afghanistan): I think most of us have read this one by now, yes? If you’ve somehow managed to not, I definitely suggest that you do because this story about friendship and guilt and what we owe the people we love is universal and heartbreaking and a must-read.

Number the Stars (Denmark): I’ll admit that it’s been a hot second (read: well over a decade) since I read this book about a young Danish girl whose family helps a Jewish family escape into Sweden to avoid concentration camps. But it’s a testament to how powerful this book is that I still remember and think fondly of it all these years later.

The Remains of the Day (England): I loved this book so much. I’m going to keep talking about it forever. It’s beautiful and sad and wonderful and everyone should read it.

Les Miserables (France): I’m inclined towards theater geekery, but I’ve actually never seen the musical based off of this book. I did see the terrible movie, though. With all due respect to the musical, I have to believe the book is better, just because a book clocking in at well over 1000 pages is inevitably richer than a 2-2.5 hour musical. There are long passages about economic fairness that are still deeply relevant to the world we live in, and the sprawling story is very well-told.

A Suitable Boy (India): I read this either the summer before college or the summer after my freshman year, I can’t remember which. My mom had a copy, and I looked at its 1400 pages and figured it should keep me occupied for a while. It did more than keep me occupied, I found it consuming and read it constantly until it was done. It’s about family and love and marriage and the Partition of India and it’s incredible. Yes, it takes forever to read. Worth it.

Memoirs of a Geisha (Japan): I read this book so many times in high school and college that my original copy has a cover with corners missing. I know he had an issue with his primary source, geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who sued him for naming her in his acknowledgements when he’d promised not to and later wrote her own book. But I still wish he’d ever written anything else, because I loved this book.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Netherlands): Another high school favorite! I’d actually already liked the painting, and this fictionalized history behind it of a young woman who gets drawn into the world of painter Johannes Vermeer was really enjoyable. I re-read it several times and it’s still on my shelf, so it’s probably time for another re-read!

Anna Karenina (Russia): I used to think I hated Russian lit after some failed attempts at this book and some Dostoevsky in high school. Turns out I was just too young for Anna Karenina (still hate Dostoevsky though), because when I read it a few years ago I blew through it’s 1200 pages in like two weeks. Tolstoy is amazing.

Cry the Beloved Country (South Africa): My high school AP English teacher was a native Louisianan and had the accent to prove it, but she always encouraged us to read diverse books. And in some cases, MADE us read them: we had to choose between two books to read about the Black female experience and the Black male experience (we had to read at least one in each category), and Cry, The Beloved Country was mandatory reading for everyone. This novel’s themes of individuals bridging the deep racial divisions of their country through love and forgiveness resonates with me still today.

Let Me In (Sweden): I like vampire media. Buffy. Twilight. I never got much into Anne Rice, but not everything is for everyone. I actually saw the movie first, which is really great and creepy as hell, and then when the book went on Kindle sale I picked it up. It’s just as unsettling and delicately told, a haunting twist on the vampire lore you think you know.

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