Book # 36 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

While Lucinda was reading The Count of Monte Cristo she kept telling me that she thought that I would really enjoy it. And I did enjoy it, but in the same way that I'd enjoy something overly melodramatic and cheesy with a bunch of ridiculous plot twists. After a while (and it is well over 1000 pages) all of the plot details and how all of the characters related to each other just gets to be too much. Frequently I had to refer to this chart to keep it all straight :

The story starts out with a young sailor, Edmond Dantes, who is just returning home from a voyage and is set to get married to the beautiful Mercedes and become the captain of a ship. However, through both malice and bad luck Edmond finds himself thrown into jail without any hope of ever getting out. While he is a prisoner he meets a fellow prisoner that tells him about a hidden treasure. After fourteen years in his cell he finally escapes and is able to find the treasure and become
extremely wealthy. He takes on several different personas, most notably as the Count of Monte Cristo, and spends years and years plotting out his super intricate revenge plot against the three men that got him thrown into jail. And his plan is super crazy detailed and really complicated. It is almost silly how he is always at the right place at the right time, and how no one can recognize him when he puts on a different disguise, and I still don't really understand how he was able to dig up all the dirt on his rivals that he uses against them. And he even starts to go after the families of his rivals until he realizes that most of them are totally innocent and don't even know who he is.

Overall I did enjoy it... but maybe something is also lost in the translation. The style seemed a bit plain and wasn't what I'd expect from a 19th century French novel. Plus I don't know why he went through such a complicated plan if he never tried or planned at winning back Mercedes who had gone on to marry one of the men he was after. The whole book is really about revenge, and after he escapes from his prison, Edmond becomes consumed with revenge and really has no other characteristics about him. He rarely seems to have any feelings or thoughts that aren't about his plan. I'll give it an A-.

Oh yeah... the book also mentions Don Quixote.

Updated rankings:

1. Les Misérables

2. Invisible Man

3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

4. The Hobbit

5. A Farewell to Arms

6. Great Expectations

7. The Stand

8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

9. Pale Fire

10. The Handmaid's Tale

11. The Chronicles of Narnia

12. The Name of the Rose

13. The Great Gatsby

14. The Sound and the Fury

15. Frankenstein

16. Things Fall Apart

17. Wind in the Willows

18. Anne of Green Gables

19. Rebecca

20. Anna Karenina

21. Sons and Lovers

22. War and Peace

23. The Count of Monte Cristo

24. Winnie-the-Pooh

25. Emma

26. Charlotte's Web

27. Possession

28. Mrs. Dalloway

29. Gone with the Wind

30. Atlas Shrugged