Counting the Pages of Monte Cristo.

Well, that was a good nap to try to kill The Ill. I feel a little better.

I'm currently about 360 pages into The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, mostly at the urging of my partner. But I actually enjoy it. I've never been one for those great novels that originally existed as newspaper serials, like Dickens works, for instance. It's not the length. I'm not sure what it is. There is certainly something different in the anticipation of reading a  novel that comes with every issue of the paper as opposed to

having it in paperback form. It feels muc more like  waiting for each episode of Rome or Lost. But then, perhaps, you buy an entire seasons or series on DVD, like Firefly. And that's got a different feel all the same.

Reading the unabridged version of TCoMC fleshes out the story more and the side plots are nice. It consists of a lot of side characters telling more stories that flesh out the motives of connections of main characters. Having never read the unabridged version, I don't know what most people are used to, which is fine.

One of my favorite parts of the novel is that Dumas does a wonderful job of referencing classical episodes from Greece and Rome. He'll reference The Aeneid here or Martial there or something from Greek mythology. It's not that he's being obscure or flamboyant, lording his knowledge over the head of his readers. Instead, he takes the time to briefly explain the relevant parts of his comparisons, if only with a clause or a phrase describing the reference. Of course, he does this with "recent" history as well, for instance, French history regarding Napolean or the French Revolution. And I know very little anymore about that material. He keeps his readers very much in mind as he writes.

Dumas is certainly one of the more "full" authors I've read in a while. Contemporary literature seems to be more

sparse and tight. Dumas' prose flourishes and he paints his literary canvas with little blossoms on trees, with wide landscapes and darkly lit prisons, where devious characters cloacked by chiaroscuro await to pass a secret message to unknowing patsies. One book that I've read recently that seems similar is Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He, too, has a vast palate of colors, though his canvas is more like a graphic novel than a serial one.

All in all, Dumas is enjoyable. And I have no idea what's going to happen. I've never seen any of the movies. I just know that revenge is involved. I will admit, however, that I after

this long work, I'll go back to something a bit more comfortable like Burrough's Naked Lunch. I can think of little else that is much different from Nineteenth Century novels...