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    The Count of Monte Cristo, with eBook
    The Count of Monte Cristo, with eBook
    The Count of Monte Cristo, with eBook
    Audiobook (abridged)17 hours

    The Count of Monte Cristo, with eBook

    Written by Alexandre Dumas

    Narrated by David Case

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    This is an Abridged Edition



    For Edmond Dantes, life couldn't be better. At nineteen, he is soon to be captain of his own ship and about to be married to his true love, Mercedes. But his life is suddenly turned upside down when, on his wedding day, he is arrested. Without a fair trial, he is condemned to solitary confinement in the miserable Chateau d'If. Soon it is clear that Edmond has been framed by a handful of powerful enemies, jealous of his success.



    While locked away, Edmond learns from another prisoner, Abbé Faria, of a secret treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. Faria teaches Edmond history, science, languages, and philosophy, turning him into a well-rounded individual. Edmond concocts a daring and audacious plan: escape and find the treasure. But years pass before Edmond can escape. Once he does, he transforms himself into the Count of Monte Cristo and launches his plan for revenge against those who imprisoned him.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 18, 2008
    ISBN9781400178629
    Author

    Alexandre Dumas

    Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was a prolific French writer who is best known for his ever-popular classic novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

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    Reviews for The Count of Monte Cristo, with eBook

    4.5/5

    6,445 ratings189 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Just a rip-snorting good read; full of revenge, pathos, love, and adventure.
    • 5/5
      One of my all time favorite Classics! This just has the feeling of a TV series or a soap opera with the high drama and swashbuckling - fast paced action, unrequited love, treasure, it's all in there. It may look like a thumper, but it doesn't take long to get through!
    • 5/5
      One of the best.The unabridged edition could definetely be one hundred pages shorter but even so this book kept me fully immersed and interested throughout it's nine hundred dense, small font pages.
    • 5/5
      I have seen the movie, which did not do it justice, and read abridged versions of the book. I do not have the time to read such a book anymore and this audio version was much enjoyed as I could appreciate the nuances missed by the abridged versions and the butchery of the movie.
    • 5/5
      I couldn't turn it off! Intrigue, suspence, romance, and plot twists kept me up all night listening!
    • 3/5
      Well. Let me state that I only just found out, after I finished the book, that I was reading the abridged version of this story. It explains a lot. This is another book that I signed up to read with a LT group read but never got to in the month LT was hosting the discussion. Truth be told I couldn’t find it on audio book and it took me a while to work up the courage to pull Cristo off the shelves and actually take the time to sit and read it. But I knew I wanted this book in my reading history. It took a while to finish because of a few things. First, I thought the story was a little unbelievable. Second there was much more ‘telling’ than ‘showing’. Thirdly, the count sort of started to grate on my nerves with his arrogance towards the end. But the fact that I was reading an abridged version of the novel may explain all of these problems. This version is probably a washed out version of the real deal. Grr. Now I need to go read the real version! But not so soon. Sometime in the future. Man, and I was wondering what all the raving about the book was for. Now I know that I wasn’t getting the same story as those who really like the book. *grumpy face* This version gets a three star. Someday in the future we’ll see how many stars the book really gets.
    • 5/5
      This is a true classic. Books are not longer written like this. Reading this book was similar to a religious experience!
    • 4/5
      Read in abridged audioImpeccable French...Covers all pertinent events acceptablyThis obviously is not for the hard core Monte Christo devotee.But it's wonderful for those of us that simply want to catch the story(again).
    • 4/5
      I loved Edmond Dantes as a hero until his cruelty, the first of many, to the Nigerian man who became his slave.
    • 4/5
      I am a massively, huge fan of "The Long Game" and any protagonist, evil or good, who does it at amazingly. Edmond Dantes is the master of the long game and this is the whole point of his story (not his two-a.m. saving grace).

      I read this for someone dear to me and it took me off and on reading it for months, because it was really my at work lunch reading book. I got to keep her entertained with my endless commentary on it. And I stick by the two or three things I meant most that I said:


      1. I love the story, but taking fifty-percent of your novel, in the very middle, to lead up to the exciting parts, does drag. A. Lot.

      2. This novel nearly made me bitter with want to be in a class reading it. I even named my paper I would have written in that hypothetical class. Mice in the Garden: How the Smallest Decisions Makes the Largest Impacts.

      3. The open ending is literally perfect. You don't need to know where it goes. Where it goes isn't the point. The point is in the words, and it beautiful, and its exquisite. And if it were written this way now it would have to be the hint to getting a sequel and I applaud the fact it's just a masterful ending.
    • 4/5
      I’m glad I finally read this book: I loved working my way through it, and I wish I’d read it much sooner.

      This was a long read, though. Dumas definitely takes a sprawling approach to this tale of wrongful imprisonment and subsequent revenge: some parts took their time to become relevant to the main plot, but even those were entertaining to read (e.g. Franz and Albert gallivanting around during the Carnival in Rome, Benedetto’s backstory, or the tale of Luigi Vampa the bandit). Eventually, though, he plugs all diversions into the main storyline. As the book goes on, the plot speeds up and converges tightly onto its central premise, and you find out that all the digressions were more than worth it. The book even answers the question of what happens after the revenge is complete, which not many revenge tales do.

      One of the reasons I liked this so much is that it made effective use of some of my favourite adventure tropes. For one, there’s the basic “unfairly accused innocent exacts a carefully planned revenge” plot. Dumas also includes an uninhabited island; a faked death, complete with a corpse-that-is-really-asleep (and bonus points for accomplishing this by means of a potion); the digging of a secret passageway; a sweet polly oliver; a challenge to a duel; a hidden treasure; a courtroom trial with dramatic revelations; a character’s covered-up indiscretions that come back to bite them; the bullied kid who later in life shows off their massive superiority over their one-time bullies; and so on.

      And it isn’t just these tropes (cool and evergreen though they may be) that made this book such an entertaining read for me; it’s their measured use among long dialogues and pieces of character development.

      One of my favourite scenes is the one where the Count has assembled some of his enemies at his house in Auteuil for dinner, and serves them rare fish from two small lakes countries apart. First he has two of his international guests explain to the rest why those fish are so rare; then he amazes them by telling them how he transported live fish to Paris from their remote locations, acknowledging that he got the idea from the ancient Romans who did this on a lesser scale and then decided to one-up the Ancients. This establishes his exoticness, his extravagance, his delicate taste, and his practical cleverness, all of which surpass that of his guests; at the same time it’s an unsubtle demonstration that he’s better-travelled than they will ever be, wealthy beyond their dreams, multilingual, and well-read in the Ancients; his interests and his lifestyle are leaps beyond their daily life. Yet the count himself eats nothing of the meal, driving home the point that all the meticulous planning -- either rare fish is known to one of the guests -- and the extravagant expenses incurred were for showing off to these specific guests only: the count is vastly superior to them all, more accomplished than they had imagined was possible up till then. He wants them to be mightily impressed, and he wants them to realize this. It’s at this point that he casually reminds some of his enemies of the dirty secrets they covered up in the past, sowing seeds of anxiety as a subtle punishment for their misdeeds.

      The whole scene is shameless wish-fulfillment, but I loved every word of it.

      Another thing I liked very much about this book is that several characters (well, the ones that count) are not pitted against each other as black-vs-white morality pawns; there’s much more of a gray-on-gray morality present here, which makes the characters stand out more against their background and against more straightforward characters. This goes for the count himself (but more on that later), but also for Caderousse, Mercédès, Albert de Morcerf, and Mme de Villefort, to name but a few.

      To be fair, though, some parts I disliked. Some of the subplots relevant to the main plot later on do take a long time to become so, and while they pay off later, it may initially feel like a bit of a slog. Then there’s the cultural superiority that pervades the text: exoticized Oriental cultures are consistently portrayed as superior to Parisian bourgeois lifestyles; Italians are reduced to curious carnivals and exotic bands of charming bandits living in their ancestor’s ruins; and Christianity is a given, to the point of including a drawn-out deathbed conversion.

      Also, Dumas has his characters display some attitudes that are rather problematic. Sometimes these (intentionally?) add to character depth, but that excuse cannot be given across the board. For one thing, the count is unapologetic about owning slaves, who, of course, love being in his service (to the point of refusing to be set free), and about getting a kick out of the life-or-death power he has over them. One of them, a black muslim named Ali, he saved halfway through a cruel punishment -- after his tongue had been cut out but before he was decapitated -- but the count intentionally did not step in sooner because he claims to always have wanted a mute slave. Our hero, everyone! His other slave, a girl named Haydée who he raises from age 11, falls in love with her father figure, the only adult male she’s exposed to. Also troubling is the attitude of and about several female characters that it’s noble for them to die if they are no longer attached to a male guardian -- Mercédes is a case in point: her marriage to someone else after she believes her fiancé to be gone forever is presented as unfaithfulness and betrayal by all involved, including herself, and at one point she comments that it would have been better had she died instead of turning her back on one she believed lost. In addition, while the men are off doing things and talking shop, the women faint regularly, wring their hands in indecision, tragically resign themselves to their fate, and assume beautiful and/or dramatic poses when an observer enters the room. Admirable exceptions to all this are, of course, Mlle Eugenie Danglars, who I like to think of as a lesbian, and who makes her own decisions, and Mme. Héloise de Villefort.

      But I can accept digressions and attitudes towards other cultures and towards women as a sign of the times -- the book is some 170 years old, after all. Overall, then, I can honestly say that loved this wonderfully complex and sprawling novel for the sheer grand-scale revenge fantasy it is.
    • 5/5
      I'm so glad I finally read this book. The story is truly epic, along the lines of other massive world-changing literary works like Don Quixote and Les Miserables but what I find the most engaging about this book is Dumas' writing style. The way he writes was one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced while reading a book. There were times when I re-read a paragraph or a page, not because of the content, but because I wanted to re-absorb the beauty of his lines. I find myself in absolute wonder after finishing this book.
    • 5/5
      Reading the unabridged version meant that there were some parts that dragged at times (Benedetto's backstory in particular), but other than that, this book was very capable of hooking me in and staying fairly exciting through to the end.
    • 4/5
      Complex story. Multiple story lines. Edmond takes on multiple identities. Edmond Dantès is betrayed by multiple people due to jealousy, envy, a desire to protect their own interests.
    • 3/5
      A wrongfully-imprisoned man unhatches an elaborate revenge scheme.3/4 (Good)If you want to spend a couple months reading the same book, this one's pretty good for that.(Sep. 2021)
    • 4/5
      Now, I want to watch a movie to see what they felt could be left out.
    • 5/5
      What an incredible story. The moral is quite simple. There are some people you just do not underestimate. I cannot begin to imagine what thoughts ran through our character's head while he slept at night or how he managed to keep things in enough order to stay ahead of those who wronged him. A sad heartbreaking story but also one of redemption.
    • 3/5
      Wanted to read a classic after a number of detective books. A long haul of a book that is about 700 pages too long. Obvious w little to no character development w the first 300 pages interesting and th elast two hundred rushed. But a look at early 19th century France that was interesting and he did have some interesting scene descriptins and a rare insight or two.
    • 4/5
      This justifiably famous masterpiece of plotting is best understood today, I think, as an ancestor of the modern superhero genre. The main character suffers a terrible trauma as a youth, at the hands of powers far greater then him, then by happenstance acquires superhuman powers of his own and uses them to seek out justice while concealing his identity. These tropes underly many famous comic book characters, and none moreso than Bruce Wayne/Batman, who similarly uses immense wealth to develop uncanny abilities.

      Seen as a prototypical form of the superhero genre, many of the odder features of the book make perfect sense. Monte Cristo's uncanny abilities, which begin from but are by no means restricted to essentially unlimited wealth, are quasi-supernatural. He is surrounded by a host of more mundane sidekicks, who regularly need rescuing by the count's greater abilities. His enemies all have their own abilities and backstories (of whom the most interesting and capable is Villefort), as well as weaknesses that must be exploited to defeat them. Like the best exhibits of the superhero genre, Monte Cristo does not simply defeat his enemies, but suffers moral hazard in doing so, and must grapple with the ultimate morality of how he uses his powers; his final victory is not a clean one.

      This also helps contextualize the reaction to Monte Cristo, which is often dismissed as a simple adventure book (never mind that the unabridged version contains repeated drug trips and gruesome violence), much as comic books are seen as juvenile. In fact, Dumas's masterpiece, like works such as Watchmen or The Killing Joke is best understood as a superlative example of a non-elite genre, which uses juvenile tropes to tell a more sophisticated story. (It is helped in this by the sheer weirdness of many passages in the unabridged version, which elevate it above a mere adventure yarn.)
    • 5/5
      2021 review:
      This unabridged audiobook narrated by John Lee made me bump up my previous rating from 4.5* to 5*. This (very) long novel reminded a bit of Victor Hugo in places with long digressions into minor characters' stories, though being Dumas even these were generally pretty exciting.

      While I have enjoyed several film adaptations, none of them have the complexity of the novel (and most make some sort of significant change to either plot or character). I am so glad that I decided to reread this and in an unabridged edition!
    • 2/5
      I was expecting more. Not more words or pages, because there were plenty of those, but more ... something. The story moves slowly, which isn't a fault in and of itself, but why does it proceed at so stately a pace? Mainly because Dumas insisted on showing us everything that was happening with every character: we don't just follow the Count, we follow the Morcerfs, Danglars, the Villeforts. This is really a problem in the second half of the book, in particular one section in the middle where we lose our protagonist for what must've been 100 pages. Just as in a revenge story, the protagonist needs a clear want (revenge), we need to actually be with that protagonist. In particular, it is unclear to me why we left the Count's POV. In the second half, we suddenly had little idea what he was thinking or feeling, after the first half being spent entirely inside his anguish, despair, depression, and rage. The first half made us care about the Count, made us want him to exact his revenge while not losing his essential goodness. It is only in the final pages where we move back to his POV and see him struggling to retain that goodness.
    • 5/5
      The classic story of an innocent man wrongly, but deliberately imprisoned and his brilliant strategy for revenge against those who betrayed him.
    • 5/5
      Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is simply one of the greatest novels in all of literature. It is an epic tale of adventure and intrigue, betrayal and revenge, mischief and murder, romance and redemption. It is a remarkably long and complex story with myriad characters that manages to hold one’s interest and still leave the reader yearning for more even at the end of its nearly 1,250 pages. The unabridged Penguin Classics edition with Robin Buss’s smooth translation and solid Introduction is the easily the version of choice. This is a book to be savored, with re-readings certain to deepen one’s appreciation; however, I will not watch any of the film adaptations, as they are sure to pale in comparison, and will inevitably alter the matchless mind’s-eye visuals that the book has created.
    • 5/5
      I hadn’t read this book in decades, although it was one of my teenage favorites. I was wondering if it would stand the test of time.

      First, the Penguin Classics translation by Robin Buss is magnificent, and makes clear many points older translations make fuzzy. While as the translator’s introduction points out, this book is now relegated to the YA category, this is in fact an adult book, with very adult themes.

      While Dumas is perhaps one of the first great masters of genre fiction, this book transcends that classification. Besides being a riveting story, it is also a brilliant and unsurpassed meditation on human nature, right action, justice and revenge and the ethical ambiguity & complexity of all these.

      Read this book and this translation. Despite the books length you will find it hard.to put down and have much to ponder after reading it.
    • 3/5
      A flawed yet still worthwhile masterpiece that shows the prowess of Dumas in creating a character that seems, and feels, real.
    • 4/5
      I so was not expecting this book to so... fun. It is a near perfect book for what it is - drama, love, action, revenge, kindness, absurdity. You should totally read this book.

      Don't be afraid of the label of classic! Or that it is about a man in prison who escapes and gets revenge on those who put him there. Its not a dark story at all. It reminds me an Errol Flynn movie - where everybody is exactly what they seem, the good guys win, the bad guys get punished, and everybody lives the life they deserve at the end.

      But, the book isn't perfect - there is some aspects that are quite a stretch to believe. For example, Dante become an educated man by talking to a priest in the next cell over. Or how a ship was completely recreated, cargo and all. Or how the Count has a seemingly unending supply of money. There are a few ethical issues that will cause modern audiences some trepidation. The Count has a few slaves, even though slavery is illegal in France. Or his treatment of Mercedes - was she really suppose to wait for him for all the years he was gone?
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo" and am very thankful a monthly challenge prompted me to pick this book up, as it really wasn't on my radar. It turned out to be right up my alley and the type of book I really enjoy.

      The book centers on Edmond Dantes, a 19-year-old French sailor whose enemies get the better of him, leaving him in jail for over a decade before he makes his escape. Dantes becomes obsessed with meting out justice -- revenge against those who destroyed his life, and favor for those who remained loyal.

      There are some great twists and turns (as well as some tangents, but I didn't really mind them) in this book and I enjoyed seeing where Dantes' efforts for retribution landed. I thought this was a pretty fun read overall.
    • 4/5
      A fantastic story of retribution and revenge. I took the plunge reading the unabridged version and although it took a while to get into, I couldn't stop reading once the Count had been fully unleashed. I kept expecting negative things to happen to the protagonist but instead, pure revenge. It was great to read through and this one-sided dynamic didn't get boring at all.
    • 4/5
      This story is mostly a very long adventure story with themes of revenge. Dante's is harmed by evil people. He goes to prison where he is without hope but he manages to survive. As the Count of Monte Cristo, he takes his revenge on others by setting them up to destroy themselves. I thought I would really like this story but I often found myself not liking it, not liking the main character and not liking the whole revenge as it also seems wrong. In the end, I needed to remind myself that this is an adventure story. The ending was also displeasing. I did not think it fair to have to mourn for 30 days the death of a loved one. I understand why he did it, it just seems so cruel. What right does the Dante have to act as God? I thought the story was way too long, covered too much territory and I am glad I listened to it instead of read this huge overwritten book. That being said, I would read it again and I think I might enjoy it more with a second reading. Rating 3.83
    • 3/5
      Everyone in this book is bat-shit crazy.