• CRIME and PUNISHMENT
• by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• [rated by PBS readers as #64]
• 518 pages

Yep! You heard me! When I started this, the three books that made my head spin even thinking about reading were Crime & Punishment, War & Peace and Great Expectations. Fresh from the speedy and invigorating Martian, it seemed a good time to take this on.

First and foremost, I got really lucky by procuring the book with the latest translation by Oliver Ready. From the first, it was clear that Dostoyevsky was so specific in his descriptions that it would be a book needing updates. And I might be wrong in giving Ready too much credit. But I couldn’t help but feel like it read so effortlessly that he is deserving of some of that credit.

I count myself happily surprised by this great read. I resolved to read at least 20 pages of this a day so that I would stay on the train. But that wasn’t hard to do!

The writing is deeply mentally evocative. The descriptions feel current and easily grasped. Even the Russian names that scare the crap out of me didn’t come into play here, for the sole reason that there aren’t too many characters. Now War & Peace…uh oh…

The hardest thing reading it was looking at a page that was all one paragraph. Most of the pages were like that. Or, at least, way more than anything else I’ve ever read. I’m a paragraph babe. I like a lot of them. Life seems better when there are a lot of paragraphs. But once again, the writing carried me through.

It should be noted at this juncture that my grasp of Russian history, literature and how this story placed into both of them are non-existent.

For instance, I don’t really know, after all of these hours reading it, what the author was trying to say. A student in college flips out and starts to go mad. He doesn’t want to work, he doesn’t even want to eat. He ends up committing a double murder and spends the rest of the time trying to kill himself.

There’s some fun, huh? But it’s Russian so there you go. That’s the bugaboo with Russian literature…very little of it falls in the feel good section of the library.

The easy way to go along with this story is to imagine that his conscience wants him out of here from the sheer guilt alone. But that’s not accurate. He never mourns the killings; he just skips around in massive self-loathing.

Here’s where the guy’s worth as a discontented man, walking around waiting to be punished, is perhaps something that would make more sense to me if I knew Russian themes, etc. But I don’t and this is as far as I really want to go.

But I have to tell you. From writing the above paragraphs, I haven’t captured the fact that it is indeed searing writing and a book that I won’t soon forget. And I do care about these people. I don’t want to be anywhere near them, but I care!

And one more thing? I’m proud as punch of myself, that I actually read that bad boy!

What could possibly come after that?