Les Miserables: A Chapter A Day

My History With Les Miserables

If my memory can be trusted, my first encounter with “Les Miserables” was picking up a VHS copy of the musical off the shelf at my local Blockbuster Video sometime in the 90s. Most of what I may have thought or felt about the musical as a teenager is lost to the sands of time, but I distinctly remember being struck by the centrality of the questions “what is true goodness” or “what does it mean to do the right thing” and how that played out in the relationship between Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert.

Shortly after that I picked up a copy of the book from my local library and immersed myself in it over a few weeks that summer. I remember being baffled by some of the bizarre digressions (do I really need to know this much about the battle of Waterloo or the sewers under Paris?) and at times wondered if it was worth continuing, but by the time I finished I was so in love with the story. The highest of highs, the lowest of lows, a picture of grace and goodness and the limits and dreadful dangers of a legalistic adherence to the rule of law.

Fast-forward a couple of years - It’s December of 1999 and I’m a freshman in college, falling in love with the woman I’ve now been married to for the past 21+ years. At the time we were just friends, but I was fairly certain that she knew I was really into her, and I was starting to believe that she was really into me as well. A group of our friends was going to LA to see Les Miserables one weekend right before winter break and I suggested we go with them. It was our unofficial first date (she says it wasn’t a date, but it was).

Seeing the musical live surrounded by friends and next to the woman I would later marry is one of my favorite memories. The magic of the story, the music, the city… it was all there.

26 Years Without Les Miserables

Here’s where things get a little weird. One might imagine that my relationship with Les Miserables would continue to grow over the years but it really hasn’t. I still think of it as one of my favorite stories but other than maybe watching a recording of the musical once or twice I haven’t engaged with it since then. In the intervening 26 years I haven’t gone to see the musical again, or read the book again. I haven’t even watched the 2012 Hugh Jackman film! Other pieces of literature I love have been revisited over and over again. I’ve spent countless hours reading and watching the works of Tolkien, and I’ve made multiple trips through the works of Dostoevsky, but Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables has been noticeably absent.

This year I’m going to change that. I’m going to read it again, and rather than blasting my way through like I’m prone to do with large novels, I’m going to take it slowly, bite by bite, a day at a time for an entire year. My plan is to spend 10-20 minutes a day writing a reflection / response of sorts to the daily reading. The good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful - I want to make space for all of it, and spend time chewing on it. I figure if I’m going to do that for myself I might as well share it with folks who might be interested.

Why Now?

I was thinking about the fact that War and Peace has 365 chapters and was considering a re-read over the course of 2026 when I came across a Reddit post talking about how Les Miserables is also 365 chapters in length. That got me thinking about my history with the book and how long it’s been since I’ve engaged with it. So much has changed in the last 26 years. I am a profoundly different person at 44 than I was at 18, and the world feels like a profoundly different place than it was back in 1999. Yet so much of what I remember about the story still feels potent, poignant and extremely relevant.

I got a copy of Norman Denny’s translation for Christmas (I know, a lot of people recommend the more recent options but this is the one I read as a teenager so it feels right to come back to it) and spent a few minutes reading Denny’s introduction and flipping through the Table of Contents.

The preface cemented things for me. Written from Hugo’s at Hauteville House shortly before publication, it details a list of social maladies that precipitated his writing, and that list still feels relevant today. I think it’s worth quoting in full.

While through the working of laws and customs there continues to exist a condition of social condemnation which artificially creates a human hell within civilization, and complicates with human frailty a destiny that is divine; while the three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness, continue unresolved; while in some regions social asphyxia remains possible; in other words, and in still wider terms, while ignorance and poverty persist on earth, books such as this cannot fail to be of value. - Hauteville House, 1 January 1862

That’s a rather messy sentence but it does resonate. Our “laws and customs” are still working together to create artificial human hells. We are still crashing into ways that human frailty complicates any sense of “divine destiny”. Social asphyxia is still very real. Ignorance and poverty haven’t just persisted, they seem to grow exponentially before our eyes. In short, this story is one that reflects our own, and in reading it I hope I can take steps to being a better human in the face of our current manifold threat to human existence.

AI rushes forward with the pedal pushed to the metal, rapidly out-pacing our ethics and any chance of sane regulation. The threat of ecological collapse looms closer than ever while large swaths of society deny it’s even a problem. We have basic questions about how we are going to survive as wealth continues to be redistributed in more and more aggressive ways to those who already have more than they could ever use in a thousand lifetimes. We keep redrawing the boundaries that define our existence to serve the oppressor while tightening the vice grips crushing the oppressed. Shit is bleak. Shit is also profoundly stupid - the people who might be able to change it talk about escaping to Mars. Like literally propose a future where we abandon earth and colonize another planet rather than changing how we live here. WTF.

Benediction For A New Imagination

What stories do we tell ourselves and each other in the face of this? I think the kind of story Hugo told is a good place to start. When the powers that be violently press our collective imagination into a warped and deficient mold, stories can soften and reshape, reminding us that another world is always possible.

So - I end this post and start this journey with a bit of a benediction: