3.5 rounded (very) magnanimously up

I wonder if I hadn’t seen the movie at a young age, many times, if I would have liked this even more. But… I think the massively truncated version of the film works better, overall. The poison storyline is genuinely interminable and there is a lot of superfluous content embedded throughout. It’s easy and fun reading, but it becomes quite uneven from 2/3 and on. Sure, it ties up much more in a nice little bow, but it does so in the page count of an additional very long novel. The planning of the death of a billion cuts—so small as to just Jack someone’s favourite horses because he can—is so much more fun than the just desserts, imo.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still fun, though heavy handed. But the unspooling of the work is so long an undertaking you aren’t exactly left reeling as some imply. Perhaps in the abridged version, or the antiquated translation things pop off better.