It's definitely not for everyone. One of my favorite books of all time and I always come away from a re-read observing something new about it, but yeah, the digressions are insane. There was a cheat sheet wayyyyyyy back in the earlier days of the internet (on geocities, basically) about the "beginner's guide to Les Mis" for people wanting to read the story but not the digressions. It was a really useful and handy reference for skipping anything irrelevant to the main story and cited exact chapters and chunks to bypass without missing out on anything at all. Perhaps something like that is still out there, OR you can just pick up an abridged copy to cut out the fat.