I mentioned a few days back my nice big book haul – or my book shopping spree, if you prefer.
Yesterday morning the courier dropped a box containing the brick-sized Wordsworth Classics edition of Dumas père’s The Count of Monte Cristo, and I decided to tackle it from the start.

Now, I first crashed and burned reading Dumas’ masterpiece when I was in high school (I did a lot of reading in those years). Dumas is a straightforward adventure writer that is also a classic and a pillar of literature, a double role he shares with other writers such as Dickens and Stevenson.
Like Dickens, Dumas was a serial writer with a staggering output and if The Three Musketeers is his best known book – and it has been inflicted in many abridged versions to kids all over the world these last two hundred years, it’s The Count of Monte Cristo that is considered THE Dumas novel you need to read. Continue reading →