The Count of Monte Cristo: am-ah-zing

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…

Progress

This book is really long, guys.

BUT SO GOOD!!

Only 9% in to the book, and I cannot believe the amount of denouement that has taken place. It is absolute insanity!

I am very grateful to my kindle for masking the true girth of this book in the early stages. I feel like holding the real book right now would only discourage me. I would read so much for so long and make no visible progress. It’s like packing; you can spend an entire day packing up a room. At the end of that day you have a room that looks essentially the same, is still full of stuff, except now it is also full of boxes.

Once I’m halfway, though, I’m definitely switching back to paperback. Want to know why? To impress everyone and feel like a literary boss while reading it, obviously.