The Count of Monte Cristo – The awesome power of a serialized novel (No Spoilers)

A couple months ago, I made a post in r/suggestmeabook asking which of the famous (or infamous) 1000+ page novels were most worth reading. There were of course plenty of awesome suggestions, but The Count of Monte Cristo received more than double the upvotes of the next-highest upvoted novel, Shogun. I had a few books I still needed to read before cracking into Monte Cristo, but I allowed that post to decide for me that Monte Cristo would be the one I'd try first.

All I can say upon finishing it today is that it more than surpassed my expectations, and it might genuinely be the most well-crafted story I've read to date (and I say that with great excitement toward those I intend to read in the future). Now, that doesn't mean I think it was the most well-written story I've ever read, but the tale that Alexandre Dumas assembled with this masterpiece is nothing short of everything I wanted from it and more.

I was warned by a couple of people to expect a few hundred pages of slow pacing in the middle of the book, and to be fair to those comments, there is a distinct section which requires a LOT of buildup in order to properly place each domino one by one prior to unleashing the emotional hurricane of events with the fall of that first domino. But oh my lord even those slower pages in the middle still had their ups and downs, and as somebody who loves delayed gratification in stories, I still felt that those setup pages carried plenty of their own weight.

As I thought about that large section of character mapping and acquaintance making in the middle, I realized that this story's original serialized publication must have had some impact on how a story this long was able to hold my attention so firmly even through its slow parts of plot development. Each installment only being a chapter or two long, I have to imagine that was an element of consideration for Dumas, in making sure that there was always something worth reading in every subsequent release.

Now that's not to say that a novel of this length HAS to be serialized in order to stay interesting, I'm sure there are countless examples that stand against that. But even with that being said, I can't help but wonder how differently an author approaches a story they're writing when they know it's being released in small chunks rather than all at once.

Overall, this was basically a perfect story for me. Of course, there are some things to be nitpicky about from a 21st century perspective, but you have to expect that when you're reading something over 150 years old. 9.5/10 and I will immensely look forward to rereading this again and again later down the line.