This blog has been sorely neglected over the past year, much of which is due to chaos outside my control. Some of it, however, I can chalk up to reading several exceedingly long books.

            The most recent entry into this collection is the Count of Monte Cristo, which I began rather on a whim — it was a free classic on my phone and I was looking for something to occupy me during a long car ride.

            The length of the book put me off for years. Over a thousand pages, or nearly 40 hours of audio, seemed far too much trouble for a somewhat archaic book. I should have known that a serialized novel that has been captivating people for over 150 years is, in fact, incredibly readable — in fact at the beginning I couldn’t figure out what was going to fill up all the other pages, given how fast everything important seemed to be happening. As the book increased in speed and the Count’s vengeance began to take form, the plot seemed to ramp up like one of the story’s horse drawn carriages run wild; I was genuinely on edge to see what happened next. Even as I saw the ending begin to take shape in the final chapters, I found it unexpectedly moving as the book concluded.

            Not all classics worth reading are enjoyable. The great and out of date can be an interminable slog (so far I have been unsuccessful in finishing the Brothers Karamazov, although I intend to — eventually). But I’m also, a bit to my chagrin, pleasantly surprised at how rarely that is the case. I really should expect it at this point.

            Something in my brain clicked while watching a live production of Romeo and Juliet in middle school, and I’ve loved Shakespeare ever since. Shortly thereafter I found myself delighted and, at times, genuinely creeped out by Dracula. I found the Iliad and the Greek tragedies far more moving than two-thousand-year-old prose had any right to be. Last year I thoroughly enjoyed the audio book of Moby Dick. The side notes about whales and whaling and life aboard ship were less tedious than I was prepared for; indeed I found them rather charming — a bit like being cornered at a party by a slightly inebriated but good natured enthusiast, the sort of person whose love for the subject is more entertaining than the subject itself.

            The more history I read the more I realize how profoundly different people’s view of the world has been throughout time, with fundamental beliefs so different from my own it is hard to imagine the world in which they lived. But the emotions still resonate, even if they are caused by circumstance utterly alien to our own century.

            When I was young, my family visited Library of Congress and saw a Gutenberg bible on display.  My mother and I, with our limited Latin, could work out the first line of this book that had shaken the globe to its foundations — it was opened, as I recall, to the opening passage of the Gospel of John. We could still understand these letters, inked on lead type at the dawn of the information age.

            Every time I find genuine pleasure in a book written before the 20^th century I get an echo of the same feeling I had as I stood before that open Bible; and the thrill of recognition that I still draw meaning from it today.