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...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Holding Back the Dark by John David Bethel

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book.  

DNF 10% in. This is a political thriller/murder mystery which is detail-laden in an attempt to give context, but I don’t care enough about the political machinations being described in order to devote the mental energy to piecing together their importance. Also there’s a weird thread of subtle misogyny which isn’t confined to any one character but feels like a problem with the book as a whole (at least the part of it I got through). The police procedural bits were the most interesting so far but the prose even in those sections was so flat that it felt like it was trying to be boring on purpose and the conversations were closer to dialogue transcripts than full scenes. This might be for someone, but it’s not for me.

CW for sexism, sexual violence (not depicted), gore, mutilation, blood, death.

End of year-a-thon: Recently acquired

A person in a hoodie walks down a street lit by a single streetlight.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts