Lindsay Ellis

I mean, that's simply not true. Literature is plain not even happening unless you're devoting at least 80% or so of your attention to it. You have to actively be reading. You can't passively be reading like you can passively watch something. Saying "you could miss something on TV" is like saying "you could skip a page" at this point in time.

You would think so, but then there are those who claim they can "speed read" literature...

You laugh, but I speed-read all the time. Why, just the other day, I made it through the entire Lord of the Rings saga in five minutes.

What a captivating tale. The adventures of Samwise Gandalf as he endeavors to deliver a tree to Mt. Gondor has left me truly inspired.

There's also this nifty invention called "Audiobooks"

OK I finally actually watched it.

Is 'actually reading all of Les Mis' that odd a thing? I did so because skipping parts of a book just feels wrong to me.

Ooh, a first hand witness. So tell us, how was the Waterloo chapter?

Did you read a complete edition? A lot of the ones which were released are cut versions.

At over 1200 pages, one would hope. On a little research "not strictly unabridged but very close". I do not know what that actually means. The Norman Denny version if anyone is wondering.

As others have said, it's not badly written in terms of 'Hugo rants about this thing for a while' but he really does take his sweet time getting to the relevant part. I also completely forgot about the fairly large section on Argot.

that sounds as if they shorten at least a little bit, while leaving at least some of the rants in. (My edition consists of five books, each having between 300 and 360 pages, but they have paperback format)

@Larkman - I did stipulate that I personally find it to demand more attention. Nowhere did I imply that I was making that statement in a more general context, so by saying that's 'simply not true' you're claiming that I'm wrong about what I find most attention-demanding.

My rationale is thus. With a book, you devote attention, you get story. You stop devoting attention, you stop getting story. If you get bored you can put a bookmark in it and carry on later. With a TV show or a film, (assuming you're not watching it alone on a device you can pause, because often that's not an option) you have to keep devoting attention to it even when you potentially don't want to, because otherwise you miss stuff. It actually forces you to devote unbroken attention for the whole span of the work, which is always a set amount of time. It's the main reason I read manga over watching the anime - it always, always takes me less time to read the manga. I also hate waiting for things to happen, whereas with reading you can speed up that process by just reading faster.

That leads on into speed-reading, and I don't consider myself *that* fast of a reader, mostly because I've met a friend who is FAR faster than I am while also having better recollection. She can polish off 400k-word tomes in a day if she's uninterrupted.

Yep, that is pretty much me. I'm a really speedy ready and I can read pretty much everywhere. But even for me les Mis was a challenge.

And I admit, for the Hunchback I simply gave up at one point. There is only so much architectural description I can stand. I blame Fontane for that one, though.

Edited by Swanpride on Apr 26th 2019 at 2:49:39 AM

Hunchback literally has a chapter in it that is just 50 pages of descriptions of the architecture and the street plan of Notre Dame and its surroundings. Other than that it's pretty good.

To be fair, that was the entire point of the book. The story is secondary to it's message on preservationism (which didn't exist at the time).

Hugo wasn't just adding gratuitous description. He was showcasing the beauty and value of the Notre Dame, which was in bad shape by then, so it wouldn't fall to the wrecking hammers of property developers, like so many other monuments before.

This is hardly the only example of a political message disguised as literature. The Dutch novel "Max Havelaar" is basically a long demonstration of the abuses occuring in the Dutch East Indies, and the author even breaks the fourth wall at the end to make sure the message is driven home. Sadly, people focussed on the literary qualities, and largely ignored the actual message. Clearly, it is harder to fight colonialism than the wrecking ball.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 26th 2019 at 9:53:32 PM

I know. But like I said, I blame Fontane (and the other German "realists"). Effie Briest is pretty much required reading in German schools, and it really, really drags because he describes every single detail, down to the fly sitting in the swirl behind the curtain. I love his ballades, but not his books. And being forced to read it created a LOT of resentment against book which spend a lot of time on describing the environment. I frankly prefer to use my imagination anyway. And Notre Dame de Paris being all about the beauty of the cathedral...I get the point, but I have seen the cathedral (before the fire), I don't need a thorough description. That is one of those cases where the original purpose made itself redundant.

YOU have seen it, but most of Hugo's audience hadn't. And even if they did have the opportunity, they didn't really look at it at all.

This book was not written for you, or for us in general. It was written for a very specific audience in a very specific moment in time.

Yes, I know, that was my point. That is always the danger if you create something which is referring to something very current. A lot of the ideas in the book are timeless (or at least flexible enough that they could easily gotten adapted for a modern audience) but the political aspect isn't. In a way Les Mis works better because the point Victor Hugo is trying to make there is a little bit more general.

And in the case of Notre Dame de Paris the book reaching its intended goal is ironically exactly what makes the part which was originally the most important aspect of it now the least important one.

I'm now wondering if that weird word that Victor Hugo once found carved in one of Notre Dame's walls is still there.

It looks like it was carved in a stone wall, so probably yes.

Lindsay has a video on the Disney-Robin Williams feud stemming from Aladdin up on patreon, it's going to be up on Youtube come Monday. It's really good.

Interesting, I had never heard of that before. What was the feud about?

The funny thing is, I'm not all that familiar with Robin Williams as Genie, since I always watched the Dutch dub of the movie. The Dutch VA was Pierre Bokma, who also did the Dutch Hades, and was really good. Dutch dubbing can be a bit iffy for some cartoons, but Disney always manages to get top talent.

Basically Disney broke contract with him and used the Genie more in the advertising than they had agreed to.

Specifically, Disney wasn't supposed to use his voice in any products or merchandise, but did so anyway.

Edit: Wrong thread.

Edited by Nightwire on May 18th 2019 at 5:37:53 AM

Man. It's weirdly refreshing to hear a corporate scandal featuring a famous person that's just about contract impropriety.

It's the reason why the Genie in The Return of Jafar isn't voiced by Robin Williams, despite him being available and able to do so.