If you haven't read this masterpiece yet, I strongly recommend that you do. An adventure if there ever was one, and possibly the classic of revenge. The prison bit is particularly memorable. Who cares if Dumas didn't write the whole thing.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a truly magnificent accomplishment, but I found the prison part to be the weakest and slowest part of the book. It's also really cliche by now.
The book only really takes off after the prison part is over.
It's when the mother of all revenges develops, for sure.
Maybe it's become cliche because of its very brilliance, I don't know. Thing is I wasn't all that familiar with the plot before I read it, hadn't seen any of the cartoons or movies, so I was sort of "unpolluted", maybe that made me enjoy it more.
a leading academic has cast doubt on how much of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo he actually penned. A new film will also suggest they were largely written by an unsung assistant [1]
... between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles) ... The first symbol of a message to Lille would pass through 15 stations in only nine minutes. The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the line to Lille typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes ... [1]
So a short message could be sent at around 450km/h, like two orders of magnitude faster than the postal service it partially replaced, or, I guess that more likely for that kind of communication, still more than on order of magnitude faster than messenger pigeons. Then again, snail mail obviously still had vastly greater throughput.
It is also worth mentioning that this novel, and many others at the time, were published as wildly anticipated serials, not that different from the currently so popular series. You can tell from the cliffhangers at the end of many chapters.
A year ago, that was how I last read it. I would read just one chapter, each night, before I went to sleep. There were many nights where I would want to read the next chapter. (I recall reading it was not released a chapter at a time; but, that was the easiest way to break it up.)
