Count of Monte Cristo: Chapter 8

After much waffling and repeated warnings not to do it, I have gone ahead and started reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Somehow none of the warnings were as powerful as the fact that I actually own the book and it has been sitting on my shelf, taking up space and waiting to be read.

And also I missed having a lengthy book project to post about every Thursday. This is probably an unfortunate sign of my long slow march toward reading Proust.

In any case! So far The Count of Monte Cristo is all right. Dantes started out on top of the world - about to be made captain of his own ship and marry the girl he loves - and in few short chapters, he has been cast down to the depths of despair, although I think he's still under the impression that he's going to get out of jail soon and go on with his life. Oh Dantes! As if accused Napoleonic conspirators get to go on with their lives.

Book Meme, part 3

For lost_spook: 30. The book you read the blurb of, constructed a version of in your mind, and were promptly disappointed by once you finally got around to actually reading it

Okay, you know Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven? I’m not sure I even read the blurb before I had constructed a beautiful version of this book where the Lone Ranger and Tonto actually have a fistfight in the afterlife. It was epic and beautiful and probably kind of slashy.

Imagine my surprise when I read this book and discovered that not only is there no heavenly fistfight, but the Lone Ranger and Tonto don’t actually appear at all. It’s just a bunch of vaguely interconnected short stories, and I’m not usually interested in short stories and in any case don’t remember them well because I was so put out about the aforementioned lack of Lone Ranger and Tonto's slashy fistfight.

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is super good, though, and neither the blurb nor the title are misleading. So if you want to read some of his work, I definitely recommend that one.