Please note that said family tree contains spoilers, which u/darthluke11 specifically asked to avoid.

We require all posts that include spoilers to be marked as such or to have spoilers hidden under the spoiler tag. I've marked your post as containing spoilers for you, but please be more careful in the future.

OP, I think it might have been more helpful to frame your post less as "the problem with Goodreads is that it makes reading an achievement" and more as "tracking my reading turned it into a chore" (or however you want to qualify your experience).

Then people would be talking about their opinions on reading tracking, gamification, and motivation (which is what I think you were trying to discuss), instead of specifically why Goodreads is good or bad. Shame that's what people latched on to.

Yep, I mainly use it for the reviewing aspect and also to plan my reading list.

I've posted before to share my tips and tricks for getting the most out of the site—there are a ton of extremely helpful but hidden features that a lot people don't realize exist.

They're unrelated.

There are a lot of terrible (but publishable) books because writing well is a very very difficult skill that most authors haven't mastered, and a large portion of readers just don't care about whether a book is well-written as long as it "does what it says on the tin," so to speak, so those books still have an audience and still get published.

There are a lot of beautiful book covers because it is probably the single most important element when it comes to marketing (read: selling) books, so publishers invest in high-quality cover art that communicates to readers what the book is and grabs their attention.

Reddit user u/ZeMastor put together this website comparing the various abridgments (that page includes spoilers, but he also put together this spoiler-free page). The bottom line is that the best widely available abridgement is by Lowell Blair and published by Bantam.

However, if you're willing to read the unabridged version (which I'd highly recommend), the gold standard is the Robin Buss translation published by Penguin.

Morgenstern has a really atmospheric and visually beautiful writing style, which I loved. The novel just felt magical.

Her big weakness, imo, is characterization. I didn't care that much about the lack of explanation about the framework of the plot and the "magic system," but the characters felt just slightly off, almost like watching bad acting. They're one-note, lack complexity, and alternate between being too straightforward and too mercurial to be believable.

I really like the novel, but I'm not sure I'll reread it again.

I guess I just fundamentally disagree that students can't/shouldn't be taught to understand, appreciate, and enjoy literature as art. I mean, I view every book I read as art. That doesn't mean I enjoy them any less (in fact, I probably enjoy them more).

And while many students may not need to be taught to read something like Harry Potter for pleasure, they do need to be taught to read classic literature for pleasure—or, at the very least, not be taught that art appreciation and enjoyment are inconsistent with one another. In fact, teaching kinds to read well, to love reading and appreciating literature as art, will transform their entire reading life. The false distinction between "literary" and "non-literary" books will disappear for them, and they'll begin evaluating everything they read from that perspective. They'll become a better reader. Surely that ought to be one of the long-term goals of teaching literature in schools?

This is more or less what Lewis argues in An Experiment in Criticism. He basically says that we should spend less time arguing about whether a book is good or bad and more time considering what it means to read well, because if a person reads a book well and loves it then that book is good art to that person. The only truly bad book, he argues, is one that cannot be read well, which is a judgement that is almost impossible to make.

What Lewis means by "reading well" took him multiple fairly dense essays to get through, but I suppose it could be summarized as fully receiving, understanding, and appreciating the book as art—it certainly goes beyond mere enjoyment (though, for Lewis, so-called "mere" enjoyment is a crucial part of good literature).

That's what I think schools should be trying to teach: reading well. As you point out, this sub loves to act as if reading is by default superior to other hobbies, when that's clearly not the case. Reading well, though, is something special—not superior to any other form of art appreciation, but arguably "better for you" then other forms of art consumption. (And if people want to simply consume art, that's still fine. But we're specifically talking about education here, and I believe that teachers should be attempting to instill the higher form into their students.)

>Pleasure reading is not the same as literature

I'm reading The Picture of Dorian Gray right now for pleasure, so...

It's quite telling about the state of literature education that we're in a book sub and the majority of people seem to think that literature is a subject to be suffered through in school because teachers should not be making an effort to teach their students to love reading. That people here seemingly believe pleasure reading cannot mean reading literature, equally so.

I wonder how many people here had such negative experiences with English teachers in school (for example, being taught that classics are objects to be dissected under a microscope in order to find the "right" answers for a test rather than that they're entertaining pieces of art to be enjoyed and analyzed from a place of excitement) that it completely turned them off classic literature?

Oh, of course. That's not inconsistent with anything in my comment. I only disagree with the perspective that literature classes shouldn't exist to instill a love of literature.

Which is honestly really sad. Teachers (of literature, algebra, history, or any other subject) can understand that not every student is going to love what they're teaching but still try to instill that love. When teaching literature specifically, it's obviously important to familiarize students with our shared cultural literary history, but one would think that it's equally important to try to teach them to be readers who will go on to continue to explore literature on their own.

Kids' interests are malleable, especially in K-12. I definitely had teachers who got me excited about subjects I wasn't initially interested in—and on the flip side, I also had teachers who completely and utterly squashed any interest I had in what they were teaching.

Yeah, pretty sure this is the main draw. It's short and the characters are basically walking billboards for what they represent. Also, Fitzgerald leaves a lot unsaid (or, to put it less charitably, doesn't do much to develop his characters beyond a surface level), so there's a lot to discuss and debate.

....no, their lifestyle would be seen as one of poverty. They live a life of manual labor in a tiny house with no internet, television, or phone service. The blind father basically is able to do nothing but sit around the house all day.

People love to romanticize the past. In reality, most people living in a developed country in modern times (even those who are low-income) live with luxuries that are far beyond what could have even been imagined by the wealthiest people a few centuries ago.

Robin Buss is the gold standard for Monte Cristo translators and is the one everyone will recommend, unless you have your heart set on an abridgement in which case I've heard good things about Lowell Blair. Definitely stay away from nineteenth century translations because they're often bowdlerized.

No, because I haven't read them.

Edit: if your reading goal is the issue then you should probably just set that goal based on page count instead

I think you responded to the wrong person.

>Even in bitter arguments, they would call each other sir, or madame, or use the other’s respective title.

So, here's the thing with French: the language has both informal/singular (tu) and formal/plural (vous) forms of "you," which does not exist in English but is kind of a big deal in French. (Some parts of the US do kind of have a plural form of "you" with "y'all," but that's not relevant here.)

This poses kind of a big translation problem when translating French into English. One solution is to convey the respect of "vous" by having the character instead address the other by an honorific (like sir, madame, etc.).

I can't say for sure that this is what your translator is doing in all cases, but it's likely. Sometimes the translator will address their handling of tu/vous in a translator's note at the front. That's not to say that the characters don't also use honorifics in the original text, but it might not be to the extent that you're seeing in your translation (though they are being just as respectful, just in a way that can't literally be translated to English).

......But that interesting tidbit aside, Dumas was probably not going for extreme realism. He wanted his characters to sound smart and cool and to make everything more heightened and dramatic, to say nothing of the need to streamline dialogue to make it readable and compelling in fiction. Most of the characters in Monte Cristo speak much more eloquently then is historically accurate. (But authors do this all the time, in every genre, so it's not a bad thing.)

Definitely not, the ASIN is just Amazon's version of the ISBN.

Your best bet is going to be to search somewhere like WorldCat or AbeBooks by the author, title, and publication date.

ISBNs weren't around in 1910. If that specific book you bought was published then, and isn't a later reprint, then the ISBN is just something the seller uses for inventory management.

Like the other user said, he's just supposed to have bad English.

I don't remember him being exceptionally difficult to understand when I read the book last year, though. Maybe the narrator's performance is making things more confusing, or maybe it would help to read along with those sections?

>If the whole world flooded a small library with library card requests, etc. while being funded by a small community, there is probably a good chance that library won't last.

What would actually happen in that scenario, assuming that the people running the library are the tiniest bit competent, is that the library would stop making library cards available to non-residents.

No library is going to start offering a service, see it quickly draining their resources, and just watch as their budget is run into the ground.