My first Victor Hugo book was Les Misérables – a truly beautiful novel. I didn’t really know much about The Hunchback of Notre-Dame going in, but I thought I might enjoy it in the same sort of way. As it turns out, it’s a very different book and also, it’s a very weird book.

Essentially, it’s about the way in which the lives of several people in Paris in the 15th century tie together. Those people are Quasimodo, a deformed hunchbacked man living in Notre-Dame. Esmeralda, a dancing gypsy girl who performs in the area. Claude Frollo, an outcast alchemist who raised Quasimodo and who has a perverse obsession with Esmeralda. Gringoire, an unsuccessful poet who’s kind of useless and through an unusual sequence of events, crosses paths with Esmeralda quite significantly. Finally, there’s Phoebus – a sleazy, unintelligent, womanising soldier who Esmeralda somehow falls in love with.

There are a lot of characters involved in this story and I’ve only mentioned the most important ones. Though it was sometimes harder to keep up with the less significant characters, I will say that each of those main five left a pretty distinct impression on me. I was perpetually concerned for Esmeralda, amidst the dangerous world of 1500s France. I had endless pity for Quasimodo and the extreme amount of prejudice and persecution he faces for his disabilities and appearance. Gringoire was a kind of comic relief and I had a kind of sympathy for him, being as ridiculous as he was. Phoebus was also a ridiculous sort of comic relief, but he was more of an annoying character in that his unintelligence and lack of empathy have serious consequences for others. Frollo, on the other hand, was downright detestable – a horrible and disgusting villain who made me uncomfortable and angry.

I’ve mentioned that the book has elements of comedy in it and I have to admit that it made me laugh a few times. However, I don’t want to give the impression that this is a light-hearted novel. Though it is occasionally humorous, the overwhelming feeling that I had while reading it was distress and sadness. Loads of really horrible things happen in this book and as I was quite invested in the characters, it was actually hard to keep reading at times. Of all the books I’ve read, this one might just be the most deserving of the ‘Tragedy’ label. At the end, I thought that it was all so cold and meaningless. Suffering without end or release.

Sadly, the biggest flaw of the book was the fact that beside sadness and despair, my most felt emotion while reading it was probably boredom. I don’t think the storyline is boring and overall I enjoyed reading it on the whole, but there’s an element of Hugo’s signature style that does get rather grating the more you encounter it. Without warning, he’ll go off on excessively long tangents covering different subjects or themes included in the novel. For example, one chapter took me over a hour to read and was all about the architectural history of Paris. This isn’t necessarily a subject I’m not interested in, but I don’t think he does a good job of making these things interesting, because he goes into such endless amounts of detail and it’s all irrelevant to the plot. These tangents sometimes go on for several chapters at a time, to the extent that you might even forget what’s going on in the main storyline because of them.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this book. I’m glad I read it. However, it’s not something I’d recommend to everybody. It’s a very heavy read and I’m sure it would leave a lot of people feeling quite depressed. If you enjoy classics and are still interested, I’m sure you’ll love it – but tread with caution!

Rating: 8.2/10

Buy it here.

It turns out that what most people think of as the book Little Women, is actually both it and its sequel Good Wives published together as one – so I was quite shocked when I thought I’d finished the book, only to find that there was still so much more to be read. Personally, I think the two books are so distinct, that it’s strange that they’re generally considered as one. They weren’t even published as one!

The first book was all about the lessons Meg, Beth, Jo and Amy learned from their mother during a particularly significant year in their lives as young adults and in this book, we get to see how they put those lessons to use as they branch out into the world.

The lives of all four of them go in very different directions. Meg settles down and has a child with her husband, Beth continues to struggle with the illness which she narrowly survived at the end of the previous book, Jo tries to make it as a writer and Amy is given the opportunity to tour across Europe.

I really like the way that their lives suddenly become much broader and that they’re all taken in very different directions – it contrasts nicely with their childhood in the first book, where everything seemed to be of a significantly smaller scale and they were always together. Alcott has done a good job of highlighting the changes between child and adult life.

I also really enjoyed watching the evolution of each of the sisters’ relationships with Laurie change as they grow into young (or should I say little?) women. Their simple friendships become more complex and Laurie himself undergoes an interesting character arc which I thought was pretty well done and nicely progressive. He felt much more developed in this book when compared to the first one.

Overall, I’d say that this is a sequel which definitely improves over the original. The first book created some interesting characters and established who they were and what each of them stood for – this book then casts them into the world and puts these characters to the test, it lets us find out how they respond to the world. It’s an all round excellent book – although I did feel disappointed with Beth’s ultimate fate, I did enjoy every other aspect.

Rating: 9.1/10

Buy it here.

I’m a big robot fan. I always find myself drawn to them as characters and enjoy stories about them, so I was keen to try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? due to it being an earlier exploration of the concept.

Set in the ‘future’ (the 90s), the Earth has been ravaged by nuclear war and humans have mostly abandoned the husk of a planet to go and live on Mars… but some remain. Pretty much all animals are extinct, so pets are really valuable and considered a status symbol. Those who can’t afford them buy identical android copies, but keep it quiet and pretend they’re real. Speaking of identical android copies, there are humanoid androids who are generally treated as second-class citizens.

There are two main characters: one is Rick Deckard, a police bounty hunter who comes after ‘rogue’ androids. The other is John Isidore, an android who encounters a group of other androids on the run. It’s probably not unsurprising that I preferred John out of the two of them, but what’s interesting is that I felt he was probably the more emotional and human of the two, while Rick came across as quite a blank slate who just floats through the events of the book. Perhaps this was very clever and intentional. Perhaps Rick was just badly written. That’s for you to decide.

Overall, it’s a pretty bleak book, even without the nuclear war and mass extinctions in the backstory. A lot of scenes in it were very distressing. A lot of innocent people are murdered in cold blood. It does a good job of blurring the line between android life and human life, at least. At times, it even gets very interesting and philosophical too.

Towards the end, things get very strange. It’s not very clear what really happens as the plot comes to a close, leaving room for theories and interpretation. It’s good and it’s bad in that respect – I do wish that there had been a little more closure. That goes for a lot of things. I’d like to have known what happened to the characters. I’d like to have known more about some of the side characters. But though I wish it had been fleshed out more, I still found it to be a good read and an interesting piece of sci-fi history.

Rating: 8.1/10

Buy it here.