The Count of Monte Cristo -- I've read it a few times and I know I'll read it again. While there are a few books I've read more than once, I can't think of any I know I will read again.
I recently read the unabridged version, and really enjoyed it. The pacing is a bit patchy, but has (what we would think) surprisingly modern things mentioned - cannabis, lesbianism.
If anyone wants a recommendation for another good book from around the same date, I recommend Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. It has it's adventure aspects, but is also just a great tale of male friendship between two different characters.
There's nothing anachronistic about hashish in 19th-century France; it was a widely-known narcotic long before that. If you read Wikipedia's "history" entry, Dumas and Paris are explicitly name-checked (among a lengthy list of writers),
- "In the 19th century, hashish was embraced in some European literary circles. Most famously, the Club des Hashischins was a Parisian club dedicated to the consumption of hashish and other drugs; its members included writers Théophile Gautier, Dr. Moreau de Tours, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac.[19]"
I occasionally use this service called serial literature that sends an email on the cadence you want for their selection of stories. I chose Count of Monte Cristo twice a week. After the first couple emails I ended up reading then clicking the “send next installment” link multiple times. I finished the book in a week. It was such a great read.
Just remembering my first reading thinking: hey they had complex financial instruments back in the 1800s. Also - market manipulation by use of faster comms.
(How did Dumas colorfully describe those things? I think this is the paragraph: "Yes, a telegraph. I had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at a table at one end of the line to another man similarly placed at the opposite extremity, and all this effected by a simple act of volition on the part of the sender of the message. I began to think of genii, sylphs, gnomes, in short, of all the ministers of the occult sciences, until I laughed aloud at the freaks of my own imagination.")
It's old, but the beginning especially is just a non-stop adventure. It always drags a bit for me after the first third, but picks up again and continues to be great throughout.
>> It's old, but the beginning especially is just a non-stop adventure. It always drags a bit for me after the first third, but picks up again and continues to be great throughout.
Its a pity that we can have new cuts of movies (Zack Snyders Justice League vs original one) but we will never get George R. R. Martin version of Count of Monte Cristo.
Tangentially: the 2024 version [1] of the movie has been a huge success in France (quite deserved in my opinion), and is about the open in the US.
The imagery of the movie has a definitive "Batman" vibe - sort of "full circle", even though, apparently CoMC was not _really_ an inspiration for the Dark Knight, as the legend went. [2]
The trailer looks a bit generic and definitely has a bit different vibe than Im used to (me not knowing French does not help at all :) ). Also the Count after transformation seems to have a different style - feels not as distinguished as old school actors in previous movies.
But maybe it will be exactly what this story needs.
Try "Best served cold" by Joe Abercrombie. Followed by The Heroes. And to avoid minor spoilers, read the First Law trilogy first. All good books are great, The heroes is probably the best!
Thanks, it looks more like fantasy than fiction - I always liked that Count is embeded is real historic events despite me being fantasy fan and almost never reading historic fiction. But somehow in Counts case it seems essential (and that's way anime adaptation was my least favorite).
To expand on one's enjoyment of this, be sure to look up the historical biography of Dumas père's father, _The Black Count_.
For even more fun, if one enjoys fantasy, Steven Brust's _The Baron of Magister Valley_ is TCoMC w/ all the names changed and the serial numbers filed off in a fantasy setting (and _The Phoenix Guards_ is _The Three Musketeers_, _Five Hundred Years After_ is _Five Years After_, and _The Viscount of Adrilahnkha_ is _The Man in the Iron Mask_).
I just noticed that article has previously known nazca lines, upon a quick google of them, such as 'the astronaut' that we discussed in that thread which isn't new at all, can't find when it was discovered but for example I found a quora where it was discussed online 13 years ago.
"Miller says the NFL doesn’t get a cut of the amount wagered with these companies. But the NFL and its television rights holders, which pay the NFL more than $13 billion a year to broadcast games, have seen a boon from advertising by the legal gaming industry." (https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/business/nfl-super-bowl-sport...)
So we're talking about the indirect income from advertising.
The article is poorly worded -- yes, advertisers spend a lot of money, but were those advertisers to disappear, other advertisers would buy those spots. So the question becomes, to what degree does the induced demand raise the marginal profit for advertising spots. And how that in turn affects how much networks are willing to pay the NFL for licensing, and that in turn affects how much the teams get in kickbacks from the NFL. So likely marginal at best.
The flipside is also how much viewership increases because of sports gamblers watching that would otherwise not watch. Also difficult to confidently assert the value of.
Betting companies are willing to pay far more compared to other industries since they gain the most from this sponsorship as well.
I am not from the US and NFL could probably handle it, but I am from a smaller country with smaller clubs. If betting companies sponsorship was banned many clubs, even in the top league, couldn't play on the pro or even the semi pro level.
They gain the most, but in addition they benefit from the sport being popular so they are willing to help invest in making sure that would be the case.
Originally, NaNoWriMo was simple and followed the book "No Plot? No Problem!" and the goal was to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. No editing,just crank it out. If you did it, you could downlaod a .PDF file certificate.
Around 2005 or so, they started pushing the social aspect, with message boards, tracking progress publicly on the web site, and people having "write-ins" where people got together and wrote. They were still each working on their own novel; but, they'd gather to do it. (I think December became the "editing" month, so they could keep going in groups.) Not only was there a certificate; but, also all sorts of "badges."
As it got more popular, people began to look at ways to "cheat." Outlining and writing some words before November. Not writing fiction. Using stuff they'd written before and expanding it.
I've done it (and successfully completed it) a dozen times; but, then I started skipping it. I skipped a couple to 2015, then skipped them until 2020. I was thinking about doing it this year; but, may not.
> As it got more popular, people began to look at ways to "cheat." Outlining and writing some words before November. Not writing fiction. Using stuff they'd written before and expanding it.
It was the ultimate self deception. You don't win anything. You don't even have to prove you wrote anything. Just log in every day and change a number if you want the silly badge.
I think the challenge and fun of trying to write a first draft in a month is a great thing and I'm annoyed that it's become so politicised and monetised.
If you want to do it, don't feel like you have to go through nanowrimo. Find a few like minded people to urge you on and do it under your own terms. That's what I do now.
Just sit and watch, while not doing anything else? Die Hard. At least once a year since it came out in 1988. Die Hard and pizza have been a Christmas Day tradition since it came out on VHS in 1989. (I saw it in the theater in 1988.)
Otherwise, if I am watching a movie more than once, it's wile I am doing something else. Working from home, I often have old science fiction B-movies -- both the MST3K versions and unriffed versions -- running in the background. Others I'll "watch" while doing something else are Animal House, Blues Brothers, the Lethal Weapon films, Patton, James Bond, and some others.
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