Skip to main content

Featured

Two Essays on The Count of Monte Cristo

I love The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I have read the unabridged version more than once, and my most recent reread was in 2023. At that time, I wrote a couple of brief essays which I posted on Tumblr, one of which was about a canonically queer character and the other discussed a character who is often left out of the various adaptations. I present for you these essays with expansion and alteration, because I keep returning to them as pieces of writing and because I don't want them to be limited to those original posts. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout, as well as new patrons DivineJasper and Sasha Khan. (Quotes are from Robin Buss’ English translation of Alexandre Dumas’ work.) Link to Audio Version. ----- Canonical Queerness in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas You’d need to change surprisingly little of The Count of Monte Cristo to confirm Eugénie Danglars as a trans man (or a masc-leaning nonbinary person...

Animorphs Book 21: The Threat by K. A. Applegate

The Threat is a solid book 2 of the David trilogy. Jake is trying to be a good leader while handling the newest member during a difficult and high-stakes mission. This also has one of the scariest almost-nothlit moments so far.

This trilogy in the middle of the main series used to be extremely stressful for me to read (and it's still pretty stressful). David shakes up the usual dynamic, pokes a lot of buttons... and then gets very, very dark. His moral code doesn't fit well with the others, but in a dark way. I was going to compare him to Rachel, but it's not a good fit right now, and a later book will do that for me in a spectacular fashion.

The ending, oh goodness, the ending is rough.

A boy (Jake) turns into a dog

Comments

Popular Posts