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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...
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Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor (Binti, #2)

Binti: Home deals with anger, grief, and confusion, heading towards catharsis but still feeling tense for much of the book. Binti intends to take one journey but finds herself on another. It feels on edge, waiting for something to happen.

This book is full of grief and anger, and it feels more like part two of one long book rather than a second book in a series. It can be partially understood separately from Binti, but Binti needs this sequel in order to feel complete. This has the processing and the aftercare that Binti sorely needed, and ends with a taste of the action yet to come in the third book (which I will read next).

This deals with several kinds of cultural prejudices, including a book-specific form of colorism, as well as xenophobia both with literal aliens and with various groups of humans.

It's hard to describe well because after finishing it I mostly feel tense. Even though a lot of things were processed and there was a very specific moment of catharsis, it was aftercare for one tragedy while re-contextualizing a lot of Binti's past in order to illuminate ongoing tensions and break the illusion that her existence before her travels was calm. Her journey had previously been framed in terms of running towards something, and now it appears that she also had some things to run from, whether she originally understood it that way or not.

On to book three...

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