If you love 'Les Miserables' and feel a lot of genuine emotion when you watch it, then Sentimental Education is not for you. I don't want to say it makes the French Revolution funny, exactly, but it certainly finds the humor in 19th-century France. This is the novel, after all, that brought us the fictitious painting of a train begin driven by Jesus Christ through a virgin forest, an image that has never left my mind since I first encountered the novel in an art history seminar in college. If you are even remotely interested in 19th-century French art (Monet, Manet, Degas, Cezanne, etc etc etc), then Sentimental Education is the best segue into that cultural milieu, along with the poetry of Baudelaire. On a very basic level, it's a coming-of-age novel about Frederic and his fellow would-be lawyers living in Paris; Frederic lusts after an older, married woman, and when he finally decides to do something about it, his walk to her house is interrupted by a revolution in the streets. The satire of French politics is so rich and multi-layered and the whole thing is just brilliant.

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