Read this if you…
- want maybe the greatest, most fun plot of all time
- want the coolest main character ever, he's just so cool
- want a mammoth book that feels easy to read
Skip this if you…
- hate fun
- can't commit to a 1000 page book (you should try anyways, its great)
- are expecting overly deep takeaways, it's pure fun
The 
Take
Total masterpiece. Careful, expansive, fast moving plot. One of the best made plots I can remember. The character of the count of Monte cristo himself I s just awesome. Larger than life. One of my all time favorite characters.
The lineage through The Count of Monte Cristo
- The Arabian Nights by Anonymous. The Count of Monte Cristo built on it. - Edmond Dantès reinvents himself as a Sinbad the Sailor — the chapter is named for it — and his treasure cave is pure Ali Baba - *The Count of Monte Cristo* borrows the *Nights*' machinery of disguise, sudden riches, and patient, ornate vengeance; a visitor even calls his retreat "something out of *The Arabian Nights*" - Dumas knew the tales through Galland's French translation; reading them first shows you the fabulist engine humming under the realism
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. The Count of Monte Cristo shaped it. - Verne met Dumas in 1849 and the two became close friends — and Dumas's vengeful exile Edmond Dantès is the model behind Verne's Captain Nemo - Nemo's isolation, his hidden fortune, his revenge nursed in self-imposed banishment: Dantès transplanted from a Mediterranean island to the deep sea - Verne later called another of his heroes "the Monte Cristo of my Extraordinary Voyages" — the debt was conscious
Depicted in Art
The old Italian abbé in monk's robes, gaunt and bearded, standing amid the books and instruments of his cell.
Édouard Riou, 1887
Edmond Dantès, having escaped the Château d'If, clings to a sea-battered rock in a tattered shirt, gazing out across the Mediterranean.
François-Louis Français, 1846
Franz, intoxicated on the Count's hashish, slumps among Eastern cushions as ghostly nude figures swirl out of the air above him.
Édouard Riou, 1887
Gendarmes seize a stunned Dantès at his betrothal feast; Mercédès and the wedding party recoil from the table.
Édouard Riou, 1887
A rocky islet rising sheer from the Tyrrhenian Sea under a moody sky, the smugglers' boat approaching its shore.
Édouard Riou, 1887
The fortress prison rises stark from the rocky islet, seen from offshore at twilight, with a small boat approaching the landing.
Édouard Riou, 1887
Recommended Editions
Robin Buss
Penguin Classics · 2003
Buss was the first to translate every word Dumas wrote. Earlier English versions cut roughly a quarter, mostly the patient slow-burn that makes the revenge actually hit. Vivid, fast, and complete.
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Notable Quotes
All human wisdom is contained in these two words: wait and hope.
Screen & Stage
The Count of Monte Cristo
Film · 2002
Kevin Reynolds
The Count of Monte Cristo
Film · 2024
Alexandre de La Patellière
The Count of Monte Cristo
Film · 1934
Rowland V. Lee
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, statistician, essayist, 1960–: "I've never read a more limpid, more recent page-turner. The last 70 pages are so intense you will not be able to drop the book."
- Umberto Eco, novelist & semiotician, 1932–2016: "One of the most exciting novels ever written, and one of the most badly written novels of all time."
- George Saintsbury, literary critic & historian, 1845–1933: "Monte Cristo was, at its first appearance and for some time subsequently, the most popular book in Europe."
- Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, b. 1948: "Above all, it is vastly entertaining."
- George Bernard Shaw, playwright & critic, Nobel laureate, 1856–1950: "Nobody ever could, or did, or will improve on Dumas's romances and plays."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist & essayist, 1850–1894: A lifelong devotee of Dumas's romances — though his deepest, sustained published praise was for The Vicomte de Bragelonne, not Monte Cristo specifically.
- PewDiePie, YouTuber, 1989–: Featured the novel in his YouTube book club and praised it warmly, calling it 'incredible.'
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novelist, 1927–2014: Named The Count of Monte Cristo his favorite novel.