>>7288587These work for a while, but are just sad when people try to pass them off for real knowledge. I have a buddy who refuses to read anything, and flaunts his history of sparknoting everything he ever had to read for school. Whenever I mention a book, he'll say some bullshit about "oh yeah the color black is really important recurring imagery as a sign of that character's later death" or whatever.
It's like, dude, we can't have a conversation about a book you read in bullet points. You don't know the book; you know trivia about it. I spent a week reading Anna Karenina and you're going to act like 15 minutes of sparknotes gives you a comparable experience? Not a chance.
It frightens me to consider how many times I've been bamboozled by bullshit sinply because I didn't know any better.
Also OP, I really recommend reading Monte Cristo. It's not super often lauded as a literary triumph, especially not in the vein of Ulysses, Moby-Dick, etc., but I think it may be the greatest adventure story every written. The Buss translation from Penguin is, I think, the only unabridged and uncensored text widely available at the moment. I read it just last year, and it immediately became my favorite story. Gonna reread it probably in the next few weeks.
