The Count of Monte Cristo
It took me a year to finish this book – yes, even with dailylit! The beginning was interesting, the ending satisfying, but the middle was full of seemingly unrelated stories. I'm not sure if it’s an artefact of the way I read, but when the Count got to Paris to start his revenge in earnest, I got confused over who was who and which person belonged with which reward/punishment. With the French names, the multiple generations and the addition of people going around with multipleidentities and trying to scam different people, I was just reading along and hoping it would sort itself out. It does. The reader gets to ride along with the sheer audacity of the Count. I believe things would have worked out quite differently for our eponymous character in a modern novel.<br/><br/>While I'm not sure about the book's final message and the slight ambiguity whether we should go out and seek our own revenge or leave it to fate, I did enjoy this book. I'm glad I didn't give up before finishing it.