The Big Read 2026: An Entire Year With Les Miserables
A chapter per day with Victor Hugo's classic.
Hello, readers!
As I always do, I spent months trying to figure out our 2026 selection(s). I went through a few different ideas that I thought would stick, but nothing quite clicked for me. Then as I was doing some bookish browsing and list-making (my go-to when I’m bored), I stumbled upon the fact that Les Miserables has 365 chapters.
It was meant to be.
The Big Read will be spending 2026 with all 1,400 pages of Victor Hugo’s remarkable novel, Les Miserables.
First published in 1862, most people these days associate Les Mis more with the musical adaptation (which premiered in 1980) than the original novel. It’s a fantastic musical — one of the most popular shows of all-time, in fact — which I saw live and on screen before ever reading the book. If you’ve enjoyed the hit play or movie (or both), it’s time to dig into the source material.
As you might expect, we’ll read a chapter per day. (For easy tracking, I’ll send out a full spreadsheet by the time we start.) Most days will require just a few pages and ~10 minutes of reading, while mixing in longer chapters here and there. Though any translation is fine, I’ll be using Christine Donougher’s 2015 edition, published by Penguin.
Three Reasons Les Miserables Belongs on Your Lifetime Reading List
There are books you merely enjoy and then there are books that you carry around in your heart long after you’ve finished them. Les Miserables falls easily into that last category. It’s long, it routinely wanders, it occasionally asks for patience. And yet, it ends up feeling less like a book that you’ve read and more like a book that enveloped you. If you’ve been circling around it for a long time, here are three reasons Les Mis deserves a spot on your lifetime reading list.
1. It trains your moral attention and your empathy.
Victor Hugo insists that you sit with people that society is quick to label or discard: former convicts, the very poor, political failures, children with no safety net. These characters’ stories aren’t just about personal redemption, but about what changes when someone is treated as fully human after being treated as disposable. By the end, you will have spent a year thinking about justice and mercy and love on a daily basis.
2. It gives you a working model of an entire world.
Les Misérables isn’t in a hurry. Victor Hugo is not just conveying a plot — he’s trying to show you how a society works. He wants you to understand France from the inside out: its politics, its class structure, its religious life, its revolutions, even its infrastructure. That’s why he spends pages on convents, slang, Waterloo, and sewers. These sections can feel strange at first, but they’re doing real work. Then, when the novel does focus and the plot accelerates, you feel the weight of all of this other context. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
3. Its questions are those we’re still grappling with today.
Of course Les Miserables is a “classic,” but that can make it sound old and stuffy. Reader, let me tell you that its themes are as relevant as anything you’ll ever read. This book asks questions that we still don’t have good answers to: What do we do with people who break the law but are broken first? What does real reform look like? How much responsibility does a society bear for the lives at its margins?
This is a story that refuses to fade into irrelevance.
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Please let me know if you have comments or questions. I can’t wait to get started reading on January 1st!
-Jeremy