Are you serious? Reading the Count of Monte Cristo actually improved reading greatly for me, as once I finished it, it was confident that I would never find another book quite so painfully tedious. There seems to be a post on this subreddit every week telling tales of how it is the best book ever written and I can't for the life of me see why. It started off well, when he was in the prison. I thoroughly enjoyed chapters in the Chateau d'If with the Abbe. Unfortunately, as Edmond plummeted into the frigid waters of the Mediterranean sea, so did any respect I had for the book. Enter Franz and Albert, those characters I care about. Oh wait, no I don't. I want to hear about Edmond, the character that's actually interesting, but we never hear from him again, because he has now become the eponymous Count of Monte Cristo, who I also don't care about. After about 300 pages of swanning about in Rome doing absolutely fuck all, we finally get to meet some familiar faces. Unfortunately, by this point I'd forgotten who they all were. By the time I'd actually worked that out, I couldn't give a shit what happened to them either, which made the next 700 pages about them intensely boring. Finally he gets his revenge in the slowest way he can possibly imagine, which I don't even really care about because I no longer like Edmond. Also, Valentine dies. Oh wait, no she absolutely fucking obviously doesn't, which made the big reveal at the end completely worthless. Then we're left with the phrase "Wait and hope". Maybe if you'd cut down on the waiting a bit, Edmond, you could have shaved 500 pages of this book and I might have actually enjoyed it.

I know I'm going to be downvoted to shit for this, but I genuinely don't see the appeal of the book. The only other person I know that has read it shares my opinion on it, but everyone on this sub regards reading it as a life-changing experience. It certainly changed my life, but not necessarily for the better.