I like that one too. The language is beautiful

Yes. It's so serene and wistful.

Ooh, I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo right now and enjoying it immensely. Debating over reading Nutty's whitefont, but I think I'll come back to it once I've finished the book.

Okay, Monte Cristo. Whitefont for the innocent:

Damn. Now I want a sandwich.

Oh, gosh, we've got to whitefont?

connie, for my part, I don't much care if you do, as it's not hard for me to skip on by (and I may be the only one currently reading it).

But the non-fan of whaling shouldn't look down the nose at someone who loved MD.

Has that happened here, though? It seemed to me to be mostly the other way around.

(I was directing these questions/comments at the whole thread, BTW, not trying to pick on Fred Pete. I'm genuinely curious.)

The unabridged Count, to my mind, is the only way to go. M. Nortier, that conniving revolutionary, gets short shrift in the abridgements, and he's my favorite character. All my commentary is based on the unabridged.

t trying to be obscure Yes, the Count does shift a great deal in the two halfs. I don't think any of the second half is even in his POV, he exists mostly as a Deux Ex Machina with a nasty, bitter streak. I've tried to re-read it many a time, but I always bog down in the second half, to my shame. I find myself skipping to the parts about the Next Generation.

The end of Monte Cristo, for thems as forgot:

Morcerf kills himself, and Mercedes retires to Marseilles to live as an unhappy widow. Albert joins the army. The prosecutor whose name I spaced realizes his wife is a murderer (faked death of Mlle. Wossname here), and "encourages" her to kill herself so he won't suffer the shame of arresting her. She kills herself, and her little boy, and Prosecutor Guy goes mad. Danglars flees to Rome with the last of his $$, and Luigi Vampa the gangster kidnaps him and makes him pay like 500 fr. a day for bread, till there is no money left, and then lets him go. (All at the Count's instigation.)

Then, Count finally reveals to a suicidal Young Morrel that Mlle. Wossname is not actually dead; that he and paralyzed Grandfather Noirtier conspired to fake it in order to out the mother as a murderer, and wow now that we have rendered Mlle. Wossname totally void if identity, how about you all run off happily into the sunset! Also, Count + Haydee the Persian child/slave/ward, which is a development that comes in on page 1100, is completed at page 1400, and feels like the author suddenly changed his mind and couldn't bear to leave the Count without some nooky at the end. And ICKY.

My personal hate-on is for Samuel Butler's The Way Of All Flesh -- just about the only novel I've ever read that I seriously, deeply regret (had to, for a class, otherwise never would have touched it). It struck me as endlessly whiny and self-pitying, and the protagonist's boundless bitterness about his rotten childhood just got up my nose in the worst way. His parent did a shitty job, his life sucked until he was old enough to get away--so fucking what? Somewhere around mid-book I started to feel real pity for his parents, who had probably had the exact same shitty childhoods themselves and were raising him the only way they knew how, doing the best they could with what they had. What they had was narrow and limited and incredibly damaging, but fuck, he got away from it, and instead of loving his freedom it felt to me like he was expending every ounce of energy he had hating them; and, more, like Butler himself thought this was just dandy. The novel to me read as bleak and harrowing in a distinctly un-cathartic way, and off-puttingly vindictive. I hated it as I've rarely hated anything before or since.

But I was all of 20 years old when I read it, so I'm perfectly open to explanations of how badly I misread it and how much I need to go back and give it a second look. I won't ever do so without that prompting, but I suppose it's within the realm of possibility.

The prosecutor is Villefort.

I wonder if Dumas was trying for an over the top Hamlet (which, to some, is an oxymoron), with the delayed revenge theme and all.

Turkish! That's what Haydee is--I think. She always seemed an utter cypher to me, as well. I was rooting for Mercedes the whole way. She is the only innocent--other than the kids.