One of my kids checked The Count of Monte Cristo out today to read over the summer, and it brought back a lot of memories. My first year teaching, back when I was 22 years old, was a year-long stint teaching the classes of a teacher who was on maternity leave. I was fresh out of college, my dad had just passed away from cancer and I was barely a page ahead of my students, regardless of what I was teaching. Because I was just taking over for a teacher for a year, I used a great deal of her materials and lessons. When they handed me The Count and told me I was to teach it to the advance freshman English class, I was scared to death. First of all, I had never been within 10 feet of the Count, and secondly, how the heck was I going to teach this massive book when I had lessons to create, papers to grade and at least 4 hours of sleep a night? Well, that was the beginning of my love affair, and many of my student's love affair, with Edmund Dantes.
The Count of Monte Cristo is one of those amazing books which is long, complicated and completely engrossing. While I wouldn't have admitted this to my students back then, I was barely 2 pages ahead of them for the entire book. Now, I would have told the students that with relish, and we would have learned together...but back then, I had to be the Teacher.
Anyway, 25 years later, I still occasionally hear from my students from those years that the Count remains their favorite book. Mr. Been has a copy of it in his office and a school board member reminds me on occasion how much she loved that book. The reason the Count is so powerful, in my opinion, is that it has something for absolutely everyone in it. There is love, revenge, family loyalty, mystery and intrigue, secret hidden prisons, wild escapes and masked strangers. The family relationships, the love relationships and the ultimate impotence of revenge in Dantes's life is timeless and managed to catch the attention of all of us.
If you've never read the Count or if you've read it a long time ago, take some time this summer to revisit Edmund, Mercedes, Noitier, Villefort and the rest of the gang...and lose yourself in a truly all-emcompassing time period and story.
