#french classics

"The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision for the mind. " - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

However, I can't bring myself to read most of French classics. First off, they tend to be hard to digest. But most importantly, they're SO BORING ??

I don't mind hard to digest books ; I've read the Silmarillion and it was not an easy read. But it had an interesting story in spite of the whole pages describing family trees. And some parts of it are just so poetic to me. I haven't read a French classic novel with such poetry, except maybe Stendhal's description of cristallisation as a metaphor for new love.

Once again, I get that classics tend to be hard to read. But at least classics written in English have stories that I find interesting. Take 1984, I had so much trouble reading it (I learnt the word 'seldom' by reading it every 5 pages in the book lmao) but the setup, the atmosphere, the plot made me want to keep reading it !

One of the few French classic I've read is Therese Raquin. (Content warning : this paragraph is a spoiler to the novel Therese Raquin.) (Also trigger warning: murder and cheating). The novel is about a woman who is bored with her husband, so she starts an affair with some other dude, they kill the husband together, they get together officially, and in the end she's bored again. Help ?? How could I want to read this instead of Fahrenheit 451 ??

Candide, Voltaire from The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, James Canton

• howl's moving castle by diana wynne jones [fantasy]

• the little prince by antoine de saint-exupéry [french classics]

• mort by terry pratchett [sci-fi&fantasy]

• sturdust by neil gaiman [ya&fantasy]

• five feet apart by rachael lippincott [romance]