Hunchback of Notre Dame

Over the past few years, I've set myself the project of reading a lot of classic literature (of the sort that might appear in a high school curriculum) that I either didn't read in high school, or didn't necessarily enjoy as much as I do as an adult.  This project has mostly yielded rich results -- I've tremendously enjoyed Dubliners, The Great Gatsby, and even the ones I didn't like as much, like Mrs Dalloway, were still interesting.

I knew I'd run across a dud eventually, though -- one can't like every classic book -- and it seems like The Hunchback of Notre Dame is my first dud.  My problem with it is that Hugo seems never to have met a digression he didn't like, particularly if it's about architecture.  I've been listening to it as an audiobook, and there's a solid 90 minute chunk on the history of building in Paris.  This is aside from all the minor asides along the way.  It's as if I were to write the story of my life like this:

Gavin woke up at 6:00 in his house in a suburb of Boston.  Boston was founded by early colonists to America from Britain, and the oldest houses reflect this.  When one visits the Paul Revere house, one notices the small rooms, symptomatic of the building materials used in his day. [more about Paul Revere skipped].  Gavin went downstairs to the kitchen.  Many houses in his suburb had at least two levels, with the kitchen on one floor and bedrooms on another.  If he had lived in New York City, most likely Gavin would have lived in a tall apartment building, as they are much more common on the island of Manhattan than in the suburb in which he lived.  The history of skyscrapers in Manhattan bears repeating, and it begins in the year 1903, when...

And so on.  I could probably stretch my average work day out to 100 pages, but I wouldn't expect anyone to want to read it.