Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

Les Miserables is my favorite book of all time because of Victor Hugo’s divine, poetic excursions into the nature of that most fragile, most influential, most misunderstood of human emotions: love. Granted it takes him 1,400 pages to do this, but with something as vaguely relatable as love I believe it’s merited. With that in mind, if you’re patient enough to stick through it I promise that you’ll be rewarded with some of the most glistening orbs of heartwarming prose ever crafted. 

The characters in this book are engaging, unforgettable, and archetypal to the core. Jean Valjean is a selfless, burly ex-con: a sort of Herculean Jesus who is unjustifiably imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread. His struggle to find freedom in a world that ignores his benevolence is what kept me reading the most. Another gem of a character is Cosette, an innocent orphan-girl who's as naive as they come. Their paths meet, and together they face the complications of her love for Marius, a teenaged romantic; the detective Javert, who is hot on Valjean’s trail; and the battles of post-Napoleonic France, which took place at the height of Parisian romanticism. Many of the side characters were memorable as well, including Cosette’s sorrowful mother, Fantine; the incorruptible Bishop, Bienvenu; and the charismatic revolutionary, Enjorlas. 

Les Miserables is a mammoth statement about the condition of the French judicial system in the early 19th century. Not only is it a beautifully crafted ode to love, but one of the most dynamic novels about class, justice, revolution, the right to freedom and equality, and any other virtue adored by an ideal democracy. It’s a book that everyone devoted to civil rights and the equality of all humans should have on their shelves, especially considering that it chronicles much of the history of post-revolutionary France. This is the country that raised its mighty fist of democracy against all the oppressive monarchies that had a stranglehold on Europe at the time, and Les Miserables is a testament to the political transformation that took place for the remainder of the century. I really can’t say enough about it. If it were up to me, if one work were to be chosen to place inside an air tank for eternal preservation, one work that best conveys the human spirit- all its vices and virtues- this would be it.