One-year reading schedule

I have read Les Misérables through from beginning to end several times – I count seven, I think, if I don’t include readings of particular sections out of order to work on specific projects. And I’ve known for years now about the possibility of reading its 365 chapters one per day for a year, but 2025 is the first time I’ve done it. So, I offer some thoughts on the experience. 

This was faster than some of my previous read-throughs, shorter than others. The first time, when I was still an undergraduate student reading it for leisure, took me three years, with admittedly significant breaks, and a faster full reread at the start of my dissertation process took me one long academic summer. Later, as a professor, I would route-march myself and three different groups of students through it in 12 weeks. The read-through that created the podcast took about a year and a half. All of those were different experiences, because of the purpose for which I was reading as well as the pace. In each case, though, I was filtering the (admittedly overwhelming) flood of text via some preconceived notion or other. The first time through – my fangirl read – I was most interested in the iconic scenes I knew from the musical, so I was largely coasting until I got to the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter, or “The Agony of Death After the Agony of Life,” or “Javert Derailed.” Reading for my dissertation, I had a particular(ly pretentious) theoretical lens in mind. Reading to teach the book or for the podcast, I was reading with the goal of synthesizing ideas from predetermined sections and connecting them to other similar syntheses. In each case, that meant not skipping, but probably somewhat glossing over, bits that didn’t fit those needs. 

I don’t fault myself for any of those approaches; they were productive for what they were for, and arguably, approaching this book with some sort of structure to the reading process is absolutely necessary. There is SO MUCH HERE – so many words, so many characters, so much plot, so many ideas, so many topics for digression, so much historical/social/cultural background – that taking it all in on equal footing is probably impossible. Up until the chapter-a-day read, my various lenses provided that structure. 

Reading just one chapter each day is a different structure. Doing so (and, in my case, committing to writing at least a few sentences of commentary on it as well) changed the focus of my attention,by simply changing the structure that I was putting on the text in order to get it into my head. I think there’s a case to be made that this approach applied the most minimalist structure possible to accomplish that purpose – it’s the structure that already exists, in the novel’s existing chapters. I don’t know if Hugo intended to write this book in exactly 365 chapters to be read in a year, but he most certainly did intend for the chapters he created to be the book’s natural divisions. It’s a place to start, without basing an approach on any preconceived notions about what’s coming. 

And doing it this way changed the experience for me in a fairly fundamental way. Most days, it caused me to notice things that I had missed before, adding layers to my existing understanding of the book. In shorter chapters, or chapters that don’t often show up in adaptations, or chapters that haven’t floated to the top of previous analytical read-throughs, there were often details that hadn’t previously caught my attention, but that I could now take the time to notice, with fewer than 5 pages to focus on most days. 

It also provided me with a more measured sense of the book’s real proportions, when laid over the familiar rhythm of a calendar year. We’re with the Bishop for most of January, with Jean Valjean showing up on January 15. We follow Fantine for February and the first half of March, with the second half of March spent at Waterloo. Spring gets Cosette from the Thénardiers’ inn to the Petit-Picpus convent, with more than half of May spent discussing monasticism in general and this convent in particular. In June we meet the gamin, then Gillenormand, Marius, and the Friends of the ABC. In July, Marius falls in love, and in August, there’s an ambush, then both Cosette and Éponine, in their own way, navigate love and young womanhood. In September, the center of gravity is the rue Plumet garden – until it isn’t – and October and the first half of November are spent at the barricade. Late November and December are the dénouement: a rescue through the sewers (and just the merest word or two about them), a derailment, a reconciliation, a marriage, a decline and one final devastating death. 

Of course, not all the chapters are of equal length, so this isn’t precisely the rhythm of the book itself. That fact also impacted what it was like to read a chapter a day: the long chapters which are often the “big” ones in other ways as well (such as the tempest in a skull, the ambush, Javert’s derailment) were at minimum dethroned, and were in some cases de-emphasized by the realities of life and social media interacting with the commitment to do exactly one chapter each day. If I can spend an hour reading, thinking, and writing about an average chapter (in the Pléiade edition, just over four pages is the average), then I could hypothetically spend half a day on one of The Big Ones. But I didn’t have that kind of time – I could sometimes allow a couple hours from starting to read to finishing my post, and that post needed to be of reasonable social media length (a boundary I very much push, I realize – but look, y’all are willing to read a massive doorstop of a book, so you’re going to what, complain about three extra sentences?) So 25 pages of the ambush got more or less as much attention as one page describing Gillenormand’s house. Shorter chapters, in other words, got proportionally more attention, elevating some things that might otherwise be eclipsed by the Big Moments. 

The result, for me, was a greater appreciation for the book’s rich detail, in terms of plot, character, setting, and history. Annoyed as we might get by Hugo’s apparently desperate need for an editor, he doesn’t let words go to waste. Would the story be clearer and more dramatic if we didn’t lose track of our characters for three weeks while he discusses the battle of Waterloo? Probably. But that digression on Waterloo, if we manage to imbibe the details, comes back over and over to enrich the plot, so being forced to spend three weeks with it is, alas, helpful. 

So, overall, I recommend the chapter-a-day experience. Maybe especially if you’ve read the book before, but also as a way to get yourself through it, if that’s been difficult before.