30 Books Before 30: #12 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Oh, The Count of Monte Cristo. Do you know how long it took me to read The Count of Monte Cristo? Or, another question, do you know how hard it is to make yourself read a giant book when you have so many smaller books laying round? (I'm sure you probably do). I started The Count of Monte Cristo... I'm not even sure when, and only when I dedicated many evenings solely to reading it did I finally get through it.

You should not take this, however, as an indication of my feelings towards the story because I looooved it. It is ridiculously dramatic, and I loved every second of its well-crafted, insane beauty. Let's get into it.

The story is essentially a fairly simple one. A good man, an innocent man, is imprisoned by a group of jealous and/or self-interested men, left to rot for a lot of (let's say 20?) years, until he finally escapes, goes to get the treasure from the island of Monte Cristo so that he is rich beyond all reason, and then seeks his revenge on the men who imprisoned him. DID I MENTION IT IS RIDICULOUSLY DRAMATIC? Because, yeah.

I'd love to tell you that the drama and the ridiculousness is a downside of the book, but I loved the drama and indeed the ridiculousness. It's not meant to be a book that you take too seriously (imho), and you really just have to let yourself go and enjoy all the crazy plot twists and unlikely coincidences and so on and so forth. I would say that the book could honestly be half the size if you cut out a lot of the foreshadowing and plotting, but why the heck would you when it's this much fun to read?!

I would super recommend reading The Count of Monte Cristo if you want to feel super accomplished for reading a classic, but don't really want to struggle through a super serious and (let's face it) difficult one. It is honestly a lot of fun, with a few deeper moments but mostly a lot of dressing up as other people and handing out diamonds and revenge, revenge, so much revenge! Read it, enjoy it, don't carry it around with you cause it's super heavy and stuff.