![]() I was in my late twenties before I read a discussion of the book that mentioned it was one of the great revenge fantasies of all time. As happens with many things that I encountered when young, re-reading would recapitulate my naieve initial experience. I went on to re-read the book about once a year for the next fifteen or twenty years, and then less frequently after that. I could have described the plot in extremely fine detail, but I could not have explained the ways in which it resonated. But I could not have explained why the book spoke to me so deeply, could not have described why it mattered to me. I was enthralled, enchanted, delighted, and transformed. There were all sorts of weird literary devices and conventions that I had never encountered before, and many of them I completely failed to decode during my first reading. The first chapter is a little slow, at first, with Dumas showing off his sailing vocabulary, and I was baffled by the idea that you would describe someone's age as "eighteen or twenty" rather than an actual age. (I was an arrogant child.) I remember that one of the illos had a man in a long cloak, and I secretly liked it, though I would not admit it. I considered the illustrations to be a draw-back, since I wasn't a child anymore, and did not approve of picture books. ![]() The cover was grey, there was no dust-jacket, and there were a few line drawing illustrations on the inside. I remember the weight of the book on my ankle, I remember flexing my foot up and down, feeling the weight. At the same time, I felt that I could be justly proud of myself if I managed to finish such a long book. Finishing anything I started was, at that point in my life, a point of pride, so I was weighing the risk of starting something that long with the likelihood that I would hate it and either fail to finish, or suffer for an extremely long period of time. The precise page count may have been rewritten by memory, since 365 is such an evocative number.) It was very, very thick. (I am very sure it was more than 1,000 pages in that edition. It was, memory insists, 1,365 pages long. I was sitting so that my right ankle was resting on my left knee, and I balanced the tome on my right ankle. I remember taking down the book from the shelf. ![]() Reading was also one of the few things that I was given positive feedback for by my parents, and they loved it when I read "the classics." Fundamentalist Christianity has baked into it a belief in a Golden Age, and assumes that older things are better, finer, purer, etc. This was before I became a serious science fiction fan, that would happen next year, when I read Starman Jones, by Robert Heinlein. I was a frightened, lonely, unattractive teen with almost no friends, and few points of pride. It was pretty clearly not carefully curated, since the next year, I would find a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein on the shelf. As an adult, I believe I can correctly diagnose the selection as donations, otherwise known as, stuff adults didn't care to keep in their house anymore. Instead of an actual library, each school room had a book case at the back of the room with an odd assortment of books. When I was thirteen, I attended a small, private religious school, called Wilkinsburg Christian School. Tl dr: This book, my god this fucking book! I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, for the umpteenth time, for versions of finished that include listening to an unabridged, LibreVox recording by someone who does truly terrible French and Italian accents and pronounces "azure" as "Asia." I have loved this book with an unironic passion for forty years, and I feel the need to rant.
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