6. Les Mis Part A

Les Miserables
So I have been reading. . . or rather listening to Les Mis for a couple of weeks now. Yeah, its a super crazy long book. More than 45 hours of listening at 1.5 speed to be exact. I just finished it and I feel the need to ponder a little bit about what I think about it and how I am going to let it affect my life now that it is a part of me. That is how I feel about reading good books, or bad ones for that matter, they become an essential or important part of who I am, how I see the world, the things that I appreciate, the people that I am capable of relating to. Sometimes a really good movie an have the same effect, however, I feel that a book due to the amount of time required to spend with it, and the effort needed to imagine the faces, the expressions on those faces, the voice of every single character, the would-be back ground music (which totally happens by the way) makes it more internal and personal than a movie that really gives you everything on a plate, could ever be. Alright, sorry about the tangent.
The general overview: I really enjoyed Les Miserables, I have wanted to read it for a good while now, but never got up the courage to start a book that big, so even if it wasn't that great of a book, (which, don't get me wrong, it was) I still would have felt a great sense of accomplishment upon finishing it. I thought that the character development great for a a few key characters, lacking a little in some other characters.... now that I am playing critique, I am a little self conscious doing so to a book this old, popular, and renowned, because whatever bad things I say about it will surely say more about myself than the book itself, but here we go anyway. I thought that the plot of the book was fascinating. The author did a really good job of making me love the protagonist (Jon val Jon and hating with a deep passion the antagonists (the Tenadie couple).  Another fun fact: if you listen to a lot of audiobooks you'll start to realize that you have no idea how the names of a lot of characters with difficult names are spelled—because you've never seen them. haha—so those are most definitely spelled wrong. I am sure of it.