The Count of Monte Cristo

More than 2⭐️ but not enough to round up to 3.

Okay, am I the only one who though this book was very frustrating and uncomfortable?

It started so promising - an innocent man is betrayed by envious and jealous fake friends and ends up in a terrible prison. There was some great adventure, some nice secrets and some interesting characters. I was affected and engaged and had such high hopes.
And then it turned into this strangely sadistic tale about a guy whom I simply could not, for the life of me, understand. I am gonna say it here - the reformed Dante acted with absolutely no empathy. And not just towards his enemies. Even when he was attempting to do good, he was doing it in such a strangely sadistic way that I honestly felt uncomfortable reading through it. For example, the way he brought both the old and the young Morels to the brink of suicide before he intervened, despite his ability to do so earlier, was absolutely unnecessary and baffling. It only makes sense if he did it because he enjoyed the drama of it more than he cared for the wellbeing of his only real friends and that is nothing to admire him for. And what was even more frustrating was that the author tried to play it as "they knew the depths of despair so they could experience supreme happiness" which is simply dishonest. Indeed, overcoming troubles does help one experience higher levels of happiness, but in these cases it was unnecessarily prolonged to the point of doing irreversible damage.
Everything good Dante does is tainted by his less than respectable motives and villainous manner of execution.
The author also seems to have a strange obsession with suicide and murder as forms of preserving one's honour. I assume that it's probably dictated by the morals of the period this book was written in, but it still made me extremely uncomfortable to read about it.

Not to mention the insane amount of exposition. And while I can acknowledge that this was typical for the writing style of the time, I still found the book somewhat bloated.

I had quite high expectations of this book and I'm a wee bit disappointed.