Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazella
Yes, I'm well aware that the books are very long. If I read it, I'll just read The Three Musketeers.
|
For what it's worth, I liked
The Three Musketeers, but I
adored the follow-ups - I read
Ten Years Later (we had in three volumes of ~800 pages each) multiple times from cover to cover in kindergarten (yeah, I know) and finally locating and buying a second-hand copy of
Twenty Years After was one of the highlights of my teenage years - I didn't have to get the library copy out every year any more (plus the copy our library had missed some pages).
I liked them all as a grown-up, too (and I'm under no illusion that I actually
understood everything as a six-year-old, but there was enough exciting stuff going on to keep me more than happy!), but the entire series basically defined my childhood - I mostly played musketeers, Athos was my first love (fictional or otherwise), and I've met older relatives / friends of relatives who go "OH! I remember you! you were that little girl who always had her nose stuck in one of those really thick books".
Anyway, what I'm basically saying that if you do read
The Three Musketeers, and like it even a little, I strongly recommend at least reading
Twenty Years After, too - that one, to me, had the best balance of adventure and politics. As much as I loved
Ten Years Later, that's heavier on the court intrigue and politics than on action/adventure, compared to the earlier books.
But, once again, I can't say anything about the quality of any of the English translations out there, and any enjoyment of those books will probably depend on the writing/translation/interpretation as well as on the actual content.