A couple years back
I decided I was going to start reading classic literature. I love to watch period movies like Jane Eyre, and I can easily get sucked into TV shows like The Tutors. I love how they talk, how they dress, and the pure survival mode embedded into their characters. What better genre from which to choose!
I started to form a list of books to read. Up until this point my repertoire consisted of Nicholas Sparks, Mitch Albom, and Harry Potter with a few more serious stories sprinkled in here and there such as The Book Thief, and Spider by Patrick McGrath both great reads with more serious content so I put myself up for the challenge of throwing in dialog that was next to impossible to understand.
Wuthering Heights was a little difficult to read but I enjoyed the plot, Little Women, in my opinion was about 200 pages too long, but again I enjoyed the story and was constantly wondering what would become of Jo; she made out pretty well, and I was glad I finished the story.
Crime and Punishment is on every list of must read classic books, so when I found a copy on the shelf at my local thrift store I picked it up without hesitation. I have been trying to get through this book for what feels like a year, but it’s only been three months. I’ve abandoned it for other books, but then picked it back up because I refuse to put it back on the shelf unfinished. I reluctantly struggle through each and every chapter, until now, the end of the book.
The last 100 pages are like the end of a suspense movie! Everything comes together, the boring, mundane body of this book explodes in your face. There were many times while I was reading that I realized my mind was elsewhere, dialogue is repeated up to four times! He thought to himself, he told his friend, he thought about telling someone else, he decided he shouldn’t tell, each time repeating the same exact thing! And the names! I know it’s a Russian novel, and the only blame I lay is on myself because these names are not familiar in the least, and my brain doesn’t even want to try the pronunciation, so the characters got a little jumbled for me.
I got the gist of the story, I just couldn’t see where he was going with it, the book seemed like a whole lot of rambling and bringing in subplots that didn’t matter. In hindsight the subplots did matter, I knew in the back of my mind that they had to in order to know backstories and true characters, but I was just bored with it all. I never thought about this book while I wasn’t reading it like I do others, when it came to mind I almost deflated by the thought of reading on. But read on I did, driven by determination to be able to say I read that book, and to be able to put it on my read shelf.
I have about 20 pages left, I’ve already read the last couple of sentences so I know how it ends, but now I’m driven to find out his last steps toward the courthouse even though I’m procrastinating at finishing by what I’m doing now.
I would not recommend this book to anyone, but I’m very glad I read it.
Pool of Life. 