The Abbreviated Monte Cristo

TL:DNR? The Best of Monte Cristo (no spoilers!) Okay, so maybe one is too busy to read this ENTIRE website to get my recommendations. True, it's a lot to sift through. So, in the interests of serving people who lack the spare time to leisurely read a 5-volume version of The Count of Monte Cristo in antiquated English, and who simply want me to cut to the chase and recommend something, I bring you: The Best of Monte Cristo ! Best Unabridged Edition (of 2 total) The Count of Monte Cristo , 1276 pgs. Translated by Robin Buss. 1996, pub: Penguin Classics There is absolutely no doubt about this. Any reader who wants the complete, unabridged Monte Cristo experience should read the Penguin Classics Robin Buss translation. Not only did Buss re-translate the book into truly Modern English,...

The Winners and Losers of Monte Cristo: A "What If" Scenario This article came about while I was musing about "What If" scenarios. The Count of Monte Cristo is a long book, and most of the characters came through it irrevocably changed, some for better, some for worse. But "What If" the events in the book did not happen?  Suppose Dantes was arrested, imprisoned, escaped and found the treasure, but chose to forego any revenge, and settled in London, or Florence, or Vienna with his windfall, leaving the chips to fall where they may in Marseilles and Paris? Interestingly enough, some fates were inevitable. There were characters who already had the means to execute their own schemes and plans, regardless of the existence of the Count! Let's take a closer look! Character Notes on canonical ending What if book's events did not happen? ...

Section Six: Infodumps of Monte Cristo Just in case anyone would want to do a deeper dive, and would like to see my data (used in compiling all the information on this site), I am making my research available. The most logical way of  aggregating all this information was an Excel spreadsheet. The presence, or absence of various chapters or plot points in order to compare them became very obvious when placed together this way. For the serious text abridgements (for teens and adults), going chapter-by-chapter made the most sense. But, due to the various methods used to abridge the novel, some chapters were only partly present, with the rest left on the cutting room floor. So, I started to use the "P" (partial) and "S" (summarized) indicators in my later research stages. Link: Teen & Adult books For children's books and comics, going chapter-by-chapter made no sense. Because those books were less than 1/1...

 The Abbreviated Monte Cristo Everything you've ever wanted to know about Abridged editions, Children's editions, Comics and Manga and Movie versions of The Count of Monte Cristo It's an age-old question, "I've heard of/someone recommended to me/I've seen the movie The Count of Monte Cristo , and I want to read the book now! There's so many different ones floating around! Which one should I get?" The answer is not exactly easy or obvious. Different audiences have different needs, expectations and desires. The actual Alexandre Dumas novel was written in 1844 in French, and was quickly translated into English. The most famous unabridged English edition was done in 1846, and published by Chapman-Hall and is in public domain and is available for free on the Internet . Alternatively, there is a revised, re-translated unabridged edition by R...

Section Two: Monte Cristo for Kids Ah! Children's editions! Since The Count of Monte Cristo is almost 200 years old, and by a famous author, it's been adapted many times into a child-friendly package, perfect for a bedtime story! Classics Illustrated has set the bar pretty high- by proving that the entire novel, with subplots, can be shoehorned into less than 100 pages. The children's text editions have a tendency to do away with the violence, emphasize Dantes' imprisonment and escape, and cut corners on the "revenge" part. Some add child-friendly humorous scenes, have radical "re-interpretations" of the events and/or add manufactured happy endings (usually involving Dantes/The Count getting back together with Mercedes). They also draw strict lines between good/evil, with the protagonist, Dantes, as "good" and the Villefort/Fernand/Danglars trio as "evil".  I've done a site-wid...