I did it! I finished The Count of Monte Cristo. Simply put, and in the words of a great heroine, this book is UH-MAH-ZING.
I can honestly say that there is little chance that I would have read this mammoth were it not for this list. I am so very happy that I did.
If read unabridged (as I have) it will likely be north of 1400 pages, depending on your translation. Often a book will include passages which you could do without. For example, the excerpt of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism in Orwell’s 1984. I’m sure Goldstein had a lot of great points in there, but I for one could have done without that whole chapter. Naturally, you would expect this to be especially true of a book whose girth renders it a viable alternative to bricks. And you would be wrong.
What makes Monte Cristo rare is that there is not a single chapter or passage that I would have taken out. I don’t even know how abridged versions of this book exist. I pity the editors who had to sit down with this masterpiece and start hacking it up, determining which bits to keep and which to cut out. I couldn’t have done it! I would have made the margins wider and the font smaller and spacing narrower and called it a day. This book is amazing and if you go for the abridged version you are cheating yourself out of some Grade A literature.
And now I leave you with this collection of images and gifs which represent how I felt when I finished reading this book. Awesome as it was, 1462 pages is still a lot of pages. Enjoy!
and finally…