I always enjoy reading classic writers. All the classics are good teachers. Some because they give accurate and useful advice, and some others because every piece of advice they give is wrong.

So, for example, by reading Dickens, you can learn valuable things, while by reading Hugo, you learn things that are unnecessary while reading a novel. I have serious reservations about Hugo's novels, all of them, from 'Les Miserables' to 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame'. It seems to me that, in general, Hugo was not interested in the novel, but in the progress of humanity. As a result, he often belittles the novel.

Hygo is like an elementary school, from which all subjects are learned, geography, history, architecture, but these details are completely often for a novel. For example, when Jean Valjean and Marius enter the sewers and we wait to see what will happen next with these exhausted characters being pursued by Javert, Hugo leaves them at the entrance of the sewers and describes how the sewers of Paris were built. Sixty pages of description of the construction of the sewers of Paris, which we do not need. With such a detailed description, one might think that it is impossible to build sewers anywhere without reading 'Les Miserables'.

Hugo has always had this habit. The book 'Ninety-Three' begins with an endless - and wonderful, admittedly - description of the battle of Waterloo, but which has nothing to do with the subject itself, except for one detail: someone steals the watch of a dead soldier. The only connection with the subject of this endless description, which could constitute a book by itself, is that watch.

What would you prefer: an author like Hugo, with his endless descriptions, or an author like Dickens (and others)?