From the Bookshelf of Should have read classics…

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

Start date: June 1, 2011

Finish date: August 20, 2011

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Why we're reading this: Group read for June-August
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What Members Thought

Mar 08, 2011 Melissa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-reads

Do you hear the sounds of feet stomping all over my house? That's the sound of the happy dance I started after finishing the 1243 pages of the unabridged Penguin translation of this wonderful book. I have never read The Count of Monte Cristo before, but my husband loves the book, so I decided to finally give it a go. I admit that the 1200+ pages were daunting to me. I'm not sure why. I breezed through the Harry Potter books, and the total pages in them well exceeded the pages in this book. Maybe Do you hear the sounds of feet stomping all over my house? That's the sound of the happy dance I started after finishing the 1243 pages of the unabridged Penguin translation of this wonderful book. I have never read The Count of Monte Cristo before, but my husband loves the book, so I decided to finally give it a go. I admit that the 1200+ pages were daunting to me. I'm not sure why. I breezed through the Harry Potter books, and the total pages in them well exceeded the pages in this book. Maybe having it all in one book scared me a little. I must be a little bit of a reading wimp.

I admit that during the first 900 pages of this novel I was constantly referring to how far I had read or how far I had left. I celebrated each milestone on my kindle as I finished 1/4, then 1/2,and finally 3/4 of the book and treated the reading more like a task to complete rather than an enjoyable past-time. At those points I would have ranked this book with a four star. It was enjoyable to read, but it hadn't totally grabbed my attention to where I couldn't put it down. But at around the 3/4 mark I stopped paying attention to my progress reading. Instead I dropped everything to continue reading so I could see where everything would turn out.

I ended up loving this book. It was very enjoyable with some great themes to consider as I read. I do wish that as I read I would have jotted down some notes at the end of each chapter to keep track of all the characters and how they related to each other. The Count took ten years to unhatch his little plan of revenge, so it was a pretty intricate little plot. After reading so many pages, I sometimes forgot little details that would have clarified how each character related to one another. At the beginning -- or well, after the Count escaped from prison -- I was rooting for him in his need to exact revenge on the horrible people who sent him to prison. But, by the end I have to admit that I was feeling a little wary of some of his methods. I actually felt terribly bad for the events relating to Villefort and his family. He was a horrible person who was horrible to so many people, but it was still hard to read about how low he was brought. Luckily, this novel wasn't just a novel about exacting revenge on our enemies. It was also a story about bringing joy to those we love also. I was happy for the ending and those who found happiness. Those parts of the book were my favorite, although they were a small minority of the plot lines. I didn't really like the ending for Mercedes, but that's probably the hopeless romantic in me that wanted for everything that was taken away from Dantes in the beginning to be restored to him in the end. It was an excellent novel. I can't imagine how this could be abridged at all. Unlike some works by Hugo where he can meander for hundreds of pages on digressions that only minimally relate to characters in the novel, in this work by Dumas I thought that most everything was important to the plot. It never dragged and was always interesting, especially by the last 1/4 of the book when all of the setup of the previous pages finally begins to come to fruition. Loved it! ...more

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