The Count of Monte Cristo part 2

The Count of Monte Cristo is so COOL! Last class we broke up into mini-book clubs and chose a book to read. We chose the Count of Monte Cristo and this is my experience. My first step was to get a general overview of the book, so the first stop was Sparknotes.com



I went to Sparknotes to get a quick understanding of the themes, plots and major topics covered in the book. The Count of Monte Cristo is ~1,500 pages long so it was nice to get an overview in a relatively short amount of time. Some people criticize this approach because they think it reduced the readers ability to draw their own conclusions or have personal meaning and application. For me, it made reading the Count of Monte Cristo more exciting because I knew what to look for and better understood the significance of subtle literary tools.

Edmond Dantes as himself/sailor

Edmond Dantes as the Count of Monte Cristo

For example, multiple characters in the Count of Monte Cristo change names multiple times at a variety of points in the story. Alexander Dumas is using this to symbolize the evolution of his characters. Edmond Dantes is a light-hearted, uneducated but very able sailor that has the world on a string about to marry his true love. Fast forward to The Count of Monte Cristo and you see a very different person. The Count is educated, calculating, ruthlessly vengeful and removed from society. While Edmond and The Count are the same person on the outside, on the inside they are complete opposites. I mentioned this to Andrew in my mini-book club and it was like a 'eureka' moment for him. He understood the significance of the names whereas before he thought it was annoying to have to keep track of so many names for the same people.

After I read the Sparknotes I went to the library on campus to get the physical book. I used the online catalog and located where the book should be on the fifth floor. I walked up the stairs and to isle PQ, walked down until i was in the area of 2226. I knew I was close because half the entire row of shelves were the works of Alexander Dumas. I knew he was famous but I didn't know how prolific a writer he was. One book I thought was ironic was a collection of short stories that must have been 2,000 pages long. Either those are a LOT of short stories or they're not actually that short. Some of his well known works are, The Three Musketeers and The Man in The Iron Mask. The popular movies which have been based on these stories usually have a happy ending. The books themselves however, in the spirit of the Romantic style do not have happy endings. 

I searched all over the shelves and could not find .a21 (the call number for the copy of the Count which the computer said the library had on the shelf) I went back to the computer and double checked, yep I was right PQ2226.a21 = Count of Monte Cristo. I was thinking of why a book would be listed but not there and came up with two scenarios. Scenario one, someone checked it out, then returned it, so it was in the computer system but still on the librarians cart to be replaced on the shelf. Or, scenario two, someone was interested in the book and grabbed it off the shelf and was just reading it at their desk before checking it out on their way out of the library. Well I wasn't about to lose the 'holy grail' now that I had found it. So I put a hold on it. Call me evil if you want but I think Machiavelli would back me up on it. And if I use my intellect for a slight advantage, Darwin would back me up too.

In the mean time I still had to find a way to read the book so I got online and searched Count of Monte Cristo. Google to the rescue! Not only did google find it for me but the nice people at google kindly made a digital copy of it through Project Gutenberg. (It's as if they know what a pain it is to have the only book the library has checked out.) Another version is Google books.

I began reading and the tale of Edmond Dantes unfolded before me. Right at this point, about page 10 I realized that I don't like the format of Project Gutenberg. The pages only allow a few paragraphs per page so you have to constantly be reaching to the mouse and clicking "next."

Within the next two days, I was notified by the library that they had my book and I went and picked it up. Its a huge book but I liked being able to read actual pages instead of a computer screen and although moving pages is almost the same motion as reaching to click a mouse, for some reason I didn't mind it.