Everything has been done better by Dumas

Friday, December 16th, 2016

Ryan Holiday looks back at the (very) best books he read in 2016 and names an old favorite of mine I’ve been meaning to reread as an adult, The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas:

I thought I’d read this book before but clearly they gave me some sort of children’s version. Because the one I’d read as a kid wasn’t a 1,200 page epic of some of the most brilliant, beautiful and complicated storytelling ever put to paper. What a book! When I typed out my notes (and quotes) after finishing this book, it ran some 3,000 words. I was riveted from cover to cover. I enjoyed all the stuff I missed as a kid: the Counts struggle with his faith in light of what was done to him, the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return, his rants against technology, the criticism of newspapers, the influence of ancient philosophy, ultimately, a warning against being consumed by revenge. Please — if you’re going on a long trip or looking to check out of modern events for a while — get this book. I recommend the Penguin Classics edition.

It was definitely one of the books that influenced that me:

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas – I don’t mean to imply that Dumas’s novel furnished me with an unquenchable desire for vengeance. Rather, reading The Count of Monte Cristo in 11th grade clarified just how derivative most of the entertainment we consume really is — everything has been done better by Dumas, and he did it over a century ago — and it got me wondering why we don’t regularly enjoy the pop classics. We read new books, listen to new music, watch new TV shows, and wait in long lines to watch new movies, when most of the best works produced — best for our own middle-brow tastes — are still new to us. (It also reminded me that our public-school curriculum goes out of its way to avoid books that kids, especially boys, might enjoy, under the pretense that teenagers with no life experience will learn literary analysis by parroting back what the teacher said about The Scarlet Letter, or some other work that does not speak to them at all.)

Comments

  1. Slovenian Guest says:

    The Count can be found for free online.

  2. Steve Johnson says:

    “and it got me wondering why we don’t regularly enjoy the pop classics. We read new books, listen to new music, watch new TV shows, and wait in long lines to watch new movies, when most of the best works produced — best for our own middle-brow tastes — are still new to us.”

    The non-sinister explanation is that it’s a Schelling point. Everyone wants to read the same things so they can smooth over social interactions by discussing a book or movie or television show. The Count of Monte Cristo might be great but what happened recently to make everyone decide to read it? Nothing really.

    I guess big book clubs dedicated to popular classics could be useful for coordinating lots of people to read and discuss classics at the same time.

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