Recommendations from our site
“Vividly illustrates two ideas about character. The first is that our characters can change over time, the second is that role models can be powerful sources of character change.” Read more...
The best books on Moral Character
Christian B Miller, Philosopher
“I read Les Misérables when I was a kid and then re-read it last summer and…I am now convinced that it is the greatest novel of all time. Every story in the world is somewhere in there. It’s extremely sentimental, it’s extremely historical and digressive, there are parts of it that are boring as hell – but that’s true of War and Peace and other great novels. Overall, it’s such a compendious, wonderful thing, full of gems…He was an opponent of Napoleon III who had seized power in a coup d’état in 1851 and turned what had been a left-wing revolution into a – not vicious – but very authoritarian right-wing regime, and Hugo, who was a leading figure in French politics, objected and the Emperor said ‘Out you go’; many hundreds, thousands, of opposition figures were exiled, imprisoned or executed at that time…He was in exile on the island of Guernsey from where he could almost see France on a clear day. And one big dimension of Les Misérables is it’s a novel of nostalgia – he’s trying to reconstruct the Paris of his youth which he didn’t know if he would ever see again. In a sense, he never would because most of it had been rebuilt during the Second Empire by the time he got back.” Read more...
David Bellos, Biographer
