The Count of Monte Cristo

⚖The case for it

The Château d’If years are what readers name first: Abbé Faria in the next cell, the tunnel scraped out over years, a comparison to Shawshank that comes up unprompted. Then the Count spends years inside his betrayers’ lives instead of confronting them, taking the banker’s fortune and the nobleman’s title and the prosecutor’s career apart from within, which readers call “one colossal bitchslap after another.” Serialisation gave it short chapters and cliffhangers, so twelve hundred pages move like “the soap opera of its day,” or as one reader has it, “probably more Dallas than it is The West Wing.” “Abridgement should be illegal.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The Roman bandits and the long return to Parisian society are where the book stops moving, with readers naming “300 pages in the middle that could’ve been cut.” The Count’s foresight never fails and his money never runs out, so “unlimited wealth and excellence in everything gets somewhat annoying” once every scheme’s outcome is a formality. His three enemies are one note each and the women thinner still. Haydée, bought out of slavery and raised by him, gets described bluntly by readers as “a teenage sex slave who’s totally in love with him.” Unlabelled abridgements cut whole subplots without telling anyone.

— the honest librarian

25h

honest hours

36

sittings