> Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system

> Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system This is entirely the reason to read them. Literature is partly about opening up and expanding your perspectives, and challenging the reader. If you simply surround yourself in what’s comfortable and familiar you’re not exploring the depth of the human experience. And Hugo’s whole theme is about injustice and inequality. What it means to live in a society without sanitation, something that still exists in large swathes of the world. These are themes that continue to resonate. Just because he was a “old white man” does not negate the value of his literature. Instead this article reads as racists and ageist. So thanks to the Atlantic for continuing to bring up difficult subjects that make certain groups unhappy because they need to be pried from their insulated and privileged perspectives. As Hugo so eloquently writes: As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century — man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness — are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.