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

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman, and child on Earth has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood.

By day, he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn.

How long can one man survive in a world of vampires?

CONTRIBUTOR(S): Robertson Dean
PUBLISHER: Blackstone Publishing
YEAR: 1954
LENGTH: 317 pages (11 hours)
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Classics, Horror, Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: N/A

General Vibe: What if the end of the world sucked because there are no more non-deadly women to fuck?

DNF 3% in.

Having heard for years that the book "I Am Legend" is much better than the movie (which I liked), I tried the book.

Holy crap, that was a quick DNF. The (cis, white, male) protagonist's main complaint about maybe being the last human is how it made him involuntarily celibate. Written in the 1950's, this has not aged well. Also, his reaction to vampire babes moaning sexily outside his window is to be upset about how much he wants to but can't/shouldn't fuck them. I like sexy vampires. I like unsexy vampires. I do not care for man complaining that sexy vampires are a trap.  I stopped after the weird thought exercise about whether vampires are worse than the mothers of politicians and arms manufacturers, distillers, and pornographers. 

The one thing I will grant it is that the audiobook narrator did a great job, their narration reinforced the trapped feeling of his perspective, how much he focuses his thoughts on emotionally safe pathways (for him), and tries to avoid his distress. Unfortunately those pathways are sexist as fuck. 

Moderate CW for sexism, misogyny, cursing, grief, alcohol, drug use, medical content, injury detail, child death, death.

Minor CW for war.

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link

Add this on TheStoryGraph

A slightly blurry image of vampires with bared fangs, standing in columns stretching into the distance.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts