This meme was created by Joe from JW Martin – Storeys of stories!
The rules:
- Read first chapter (or chapters if they are short)
- Give my ‘first impression’
- Predict my rating
- After finishing it, compare the results 🙂
So this time I decided to go with The three musketeers by Alexander Dumas. Another classic originally written in French! I absolutely love the movie adaptations with Logan Lerman, yes that totally was the reason why I initially watched it quite some years back! I think this movie adaptation was released in 2011. And I’m planning on rewatching it soon! But since I really like the movie I thought I should go and read the source material! I put it off for quite a while since the book is quite dense. But I finally got brave enough to just go and read it!
Title: The Three Musketeers.
Author: Alexander Dumas.
Format: E-book.
Genre: Historical fiction, adventures.
First impressions (after 4 chapters):
To be honest my first thoughts were ‘this is going to take me forever’.. haha!
But I really liked the start! It was quite a bit slower then that I had expected, but I still have hope that it will change, after we get to learn all the characters and the situation a bit better. I really feel like this story is going to set up for something great! Especially with quite some big action scenes!
Like almost always, I’m predicting a 5 star rating for this one!
Final thoughts:
I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in this one.. I still ended up giving this book 4 stars!
My initial thoughts were correct, it did take me really long to get through this book! 10 days! That is ridiculous for me haha. I have to say I read it at a really busy period, and I was reading another book at the same time. Since I was afraid this dense book might bring me in a reading slump otherwise.
The reason I’m disappointed is that the action scenes were not as descriptive as I would have thought. They often were only 1 or 2 pages long. There was a lot of conversation going on, and travelling back and forth between France and England. They probably changed that aspect in the movie, to make it more interesting haha! (That’s why you should read the book first!)
One thing I really like about this classic is that the ‘villain’ is female! You don’t often see that in classics! Another thing I really liked was the writing, but again just like for Madame Bovary, this could be because of the translation!
I read The Three Musketeers forever ago and the only thing I really remember about it was that it was super long. I read it on my kindle and I didn’t realize that it is actually a fairly big book. It just kept going on and on and on and on! I’m glad you liked it but I totally agree about the pacing and the length haha
Ooh luckily my ereader gives page numbers haha
I did read the book – but it was a very long time ago! I do recall enjoying the repartee between the musketeers, but that was way before I’d seen any of the film adaptations. It was the relationship between them and the plotting I recall – the action scenes haven’t stuck at all. Go you for being brave enough to take it on. These days, I’m inclined to get hold of the audio version if I want to take a crack at one of the classics:)
I have tried reading classics through audiobook, but I find myself getting distracted quite quickly..