I shelved it as a low priority on my pleasure-reading list because there are other, sexier dead Frenchmen in the Panthéon-and because there are, very agreeably, smaller fish in the sea. I shelved it for high visibility in my apartment because it represented a handsome edition of a classic.

Four years ago, this Les Misérables arrived on my stoop unbidden, a routine publicity mailing. The copy I have in hand (where it is already doing wonders for my biceps) is a Modern Library hardcover-1194 pages of French Romanticism in an edition translated by Julie Rose, introduced by Adam Gopnik, and clarified with plenteous endnotes. I am carrying on at length like this by way of approaching Les Misérables, the 1862 Victor Hugo novel.

The tennis-academy saga runs 1079 pages, but somehow it feels as if it’s only 950, partly because of the endnotes, partly because of incandescent English on the author’s serve. And Infinite Jest? I told David Foster Wallace to his face I’d felt ripped off: That book is totally finite. The Tolstoy book is mostly radiant with a 10 percent chance of monotony in the form of blatantly skimmable passages about agricultural labor and social reform-passages that could only compel the full attention of a true peasant. Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, though only about 15 percent longer, requires substantially more stamina each of its 773 pages demands real concentration and supplies bountiful rewards for it, and on some levels the novel is grander than the 862-page Anna Karenina. In terms of epic novels, Ulysses isn’t a marathon, just a 10K fun run.

The prose weather in this Dublin is primarily bright and clear. The Gabler edition of Joyce’s masterpiece clocks in at a mere 680 pages, only a few of them fatally shaded by an impenetrable canopy of recondite paronomasia. Stately, plump Ulyssesis, in the larger scheme of longer books, a total lightweight.

Les miserables julie rose