 This is without question one of the most beautifully written novels I've ever read. Jean Valjean is quite possibly the most complex and compelling character you will meet in a work of literature of this magnitude, and the lives and personalities of the secondary characters are interwoven into subplots that make it almost an easy thing to get through the 0000+ pages of this book. I read the novel after seeing -- and falling madly in love with -- the musical, and this is one of the rare cases in w This is without question one of the most beautifully written novels I've ever read. Jean Valjean is quite possibly the most complex and compelling character you will meet in a work of literature of this magnitude, and the lives and personalities of the secondary characters are interwoven into subplots that make it almost an easy thing to get through the 0000+ pages of this book. I read the novel after seeing -- and falling madly in love with -- the musical, and this is one of the rare cases in w