alt Hacker NewsI was blown away by Crime and Punishment. I truly felt like I was the main character, and I read it with feverish sweat and dread for my impending doom. I cringed and felt terrible sadness at the poor little lives of certain individuals. So much woe and tragedy. I was glad to see how it turned out though.
I'm currently reading Karamazov and it's good to have something a bit more jovial and dry witted.
The main difficulty is the names. The names make it so hard.
I love the Space Trilogy by Lewis but I lose my place when he describes a place. Dostoevsky is better at describing people (and bringing them to life in your mind) than Lewis is at describing a landscape.
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Crime and Punishment is one of the very few school curriculum mandatory books that I enjoyed reading and actively got ahead of the required per week pages.
Similar, read Crime and Punishment earlier this year and it took me a few pages to realize two different names were the same character. Felt silly when I realized lol. Also just started Brothers Karamazov, but decided to switch translations and am waiting for new copy to arrive.
The name problem totally disappears when you use any e-reader's built-in search on the highlighted name
I've tried Crime and Punishment like three times but always stopped at some point because I wasn't feeling it.
Maybe I'll give it another go.
Read Crime and Punishment ~25 years ago, the Idiot ~20 years ago. I read Karamazov last year and Demons early this year. I still think C&P is the best of his books with Karamazov a close 2nd. Demons is very dark, but also it seems prophetic - it's like he foresaw some of what would happen in 1917 way back in 1870. He's even got a character in there that's short and bald and likes to wave his arms around wildly as he's speaking, whipping the crowd into a frenzy - sounds a lot like Lenin who was born about the time Demons was written. Still, I wouldn't have made it through Demons if I hadn't read it in an online book group where once a week we met to discuss.