What book should I read first among these three?

[malayang-diwa]

Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo or Great Expectations.

I'm planning to read all of them but I just don't know where to start. So I would like to see what any of you guys would suggest me to read first.

Tell me:

Which one is more exciting to read.

Which is a page-turner

which one influenced you more

Thank you!!

[Annamariah]

I liked Monte Cristo a lot, it was a page-turner. I'd probably start from it :)

[Calidore]

I'll second Monte Cristo. Dickens is very good, but I wouldn't call him exciting or a page-turner (though I haven't read GE yet). What I read of Don Quixote was okay, but the humor was very broad and ended up turning me off after a while.

[Page Turner]

I'll 3rd Monte Cristo as the best page turner and I know page turners.:wink5:

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

I would suggest the Don Quixote. It is the only one of the three I have read which turned out to be a good one to start with.
I found it to be a great read by the way.

[mtpspur]

I tend to like characters so for me Great Expectations was the best read. To be honest I quit Don Quixote having read about half of it because as it went on I just could not see this poor man suffer his delusions anymore with a view of cheering him on. Now I did read Monte Christo full version but I found it long drawn out and again had sympathy problems with the hero and his very convoluted methods--he could have at least enjoyed his revenge. Hope this helps.

[han401]

The Count of Monte Cristo. I could be biased, I do not like the other books as much.

[TheChilly]

I may end up starting with Don Quixote first. Avoid "Great Expectations" like the plague.

[Dark Muse]

The Count of Monte Cristo is by far the most exciting of them, I myself could not get through Don Quixote. I found it to be a slow read and became rather repetitive pretty quickly. It felt like it was longer than it needed to be and my interest in reading it gradually decreased more and more. Great Expectations though it has been a long time since I read it, I enjoyed reading, but it is not quite what I would call a page turner.

[jyossarian]

Don Quixote was a major struggle for me to get into. An incredibly slow read and I found I just lost all interest in poor Don's struggles about half-way through.
I'm big into characters and the like, so I would personally recommend Great Expectations, but if it's a page turner you're looking for, you can't go wrong with Monte Cristo :)

[jake21221]

I just recently read Don Quixote, personally I found it amazing and I was hooked from the start. Some parts made me roar with laughter, some parts where very moving and had me on the verge of tears. Even though its over a thousand pages long I found it to be about a 300 page read it went by really quickly.

[dfloyd]

As long as you read all three. these are books everyone with a yen for literature should read. Great Expectations is the shortest, not a page turner, but a fine story. The Count is definitely a page turner, a book which is hard to set down. Don Quixote takes a little more concentration, but it is worth the effort. It is generally considered to be the finest novel ever written.

Why anyone should want to avoid Dickens like the plague is beyond me. To avoid one of the finest novels of the 19th century, is a mystery which can probably not be solved on this forum. Perhaps an IQ Test would be illuminating.