And this is why Crime and Punishment is an ageless masterpiece of literature.

TL;DR: enemies are people too.

Ulysses and Paradise Lost are in their own category.

Next up is Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.

Almost fifteen years later I read this:

> “The Columbo character was based squarely on Porfiry Petrovich, the astute but meandering lead investigator in Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment.”

Which makes me kind of happy :-)

I found Anna Karenina, or Crime and Punishment 100x better than all non-fiction books I ever read.

I found Crime and Punishment shallow in it's story and characters when compared to The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" should be a compulsory read for any self-respecting criminal mastermind, if anything to stop them from saying "I will never do X and they will never catch me".

- Narziss & Goldmund, by Herman Hesse

- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marques

- Crime and Punishment, by Dostoievsky

- The Trial, by Kafka

- L'étranger, by Albert Camus

If you want to build your character, read the real stuff: fiction.

I picked up Crime and Punishment a few years ago, but had to put it down, due to both foreseeable and unforeseeable circumstances. How would you introduce it if you were to recommend it to someone?

* Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller — Perfect for a single man in his 30s. Very solipsistic and hedonistic, which is a great way to explore that decade. Each of the books in the series is a novel length prose poem. Absolutely beautiful

* Journey to the End of The Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine — my favorite book in the world. Very misanthropic, set in WWI. The protagonist finds himself drafted into the war and does his best to survive while the brave people around him die like idiots, it escalates from there. The most beautiful line I've ever read is from a part of the book where the protagonist is hanging out at a brothel: "Toward one of the beautiful girls there I soon developed an uncommon feeling of trust, which in frightened people takes the place of love." there are jaw-droppers like that on every other page

* Crime and Punishment — a cautionary tale about exactly the kind of solipsism and misanthropy that can take us over in our 30s. Fast paced and beautifully written, it reads like a modern crime thriller.

For fun conceptual stuff

* Ficciones by Borges — short stories that will twist your mind up, each are more puzzle than narrative, but tremendously engaging nonetheless. Ted Chiang is the modern writer that I would identify as the most similar in spirit to Borges.

As a note—I'm a speculative fiction author. Most of what I read these days is sff and nerdy lit fic. The value in fiction is the same as the value in philosophy, it exposes you to the inside of peoples' minds in a way that other forms of narrative entertainment do not, and the real good stuff acts as fuel for concept creation.

* Dostoevsky "Crime and punishment".

Discover how important is to take care of yourself and avoid entering the downward spiral of depression and anxiety.

* Jack London "Smoke Bellew".

Get a boost of the startup-like resourceful energy the heroes of the previous Golden-Rush at Klondike.

* Herman Hesse "Siddhartha".

Get a break from the startup grind by going on the spiritual journey of self-discovery and peaceful reflection.

* Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. "Far Rainbow".

Get to know the limits of human intelligence and capacity for overcoming the difficulties.

Hope you enjoy it!

Gravity’s rainbow: Not the easiest read but immensely rewarding. For better or worse some of Pynchon’s vivid descriptions are burned into my soul.

Crime and punishment: I’m not into literature but this one is worth it. A great dive into human psychology.

Deliverance: intense story, read it in one night. Not sure it taught me much but man it is good.

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Great insights on the way ideology and politics work.

Wasted time on a bunch of self help books. Most tips contained in these require you to accept yourself and the world to be applicable. And that’s the hardest bit...

For anyone who enjoys it or Notes From Underground, I highly recommend Demons, which extrapolates the ideas from both previously mentioned to societal scale.

I think it's his best by far.

A note on translations: I've read at least two translations for each book of his I've read. I generally prefer the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations, but there are times when the Garnett translations capture the spirit a little better. Both options are excellent, but read the Pevear/Volokhonsky if you have to pick one. Reading multiple translations can ultimately help provide a fuller experience.

One could argue that this was the defining moment of his life, and most of his greatest works were motivated in some way by the intensity of that experience. So yeah, for lots more on this, read Dostoevsky.

Gracias Señor García Márquez.

I guess this idea isn't particularly new and has been thoroughly researched by many. For some reason Nietzsche comes to my mind. And Dostoyevsky. E.g. from "Crime and Punishment":

"I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right."

One story I've heard about David Copperfield: in Russian monasteries, there are abbots who forbid novices from reading any spiritual literature until they've first read David Copperfield, because while the goal of the monastic life is to become more like God, first you have to become human.

For the Russians, especially Dostoevsky, if there is a translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, that's the one to pick. It makes a huge difference.

As a college senior, after devouring pretty much all of Dostoevsky, I read Anna Karenina largely because in On Moral Fiction it is John Gardner's favorite example of a great novel---and it was so boring. Now that I'm 38 I think often of re-reading it, if I can work up the gumption. I'm glad to hear you found it not so heavy.

A favorite English professor in his 60s told me he was still re-reading Crime and Punishment, but Brothers Karamazov didn't speak to him anymore, and he felt it was a young man's book. I've been trying for 15+ years to decide if I agree.

I did enjoy 'The Humans' and 'How to stop time' but would never mark either of them as 5 star books, mainly because I would count books like 'Madam Bovary' or 'Rebecca'or 'Crime and Punishment' as a 5-star book. Nonetheless the praise for Midnight Library irked me before I even took a look at it. Folks are so keen on jumping to 5-stars without a critical approach to it.

Rather than a single 1-5 star system, a questionnaire with 1-5 stars for aspects of a book could be a better way to rate.

From 1-5 how would you rate:
1. the plot
2. enjoyability
3. character development
4. etc...

and then average out the scores across each aspect to get the user's score on the book.

Obviously there is incentive for goodreads to push for 5-star reviews all around, for the most part, because who wants to buy a 1-3.5 star book from Amazon? Also a larger scale or more options to choose from with rating would lead to lower conversion of rating submissions.

I won't claim to be perfect about rating books either, but its appalling when a book like 'The Midnight Library' (4.3 as of this time) has a higher rating than 'Crime and Punishment' (4.2).

I would be interested to understand how you came to the conclusion that he argued for both sides? I saw a scathing repudiation of the socialist utopians of the era (and 'rational' ideologues of all sorts). He 'argued' their sides too, but with the goal of making them appear ridiculous. By the time Raskolnikov's fictional essay about the "extraordinary" comes up, i think it's pretty clear what Dostoyevsky is trying to say. Though that's just my interpretation.

In that case I've done some good! If you want his critique of capitalism, The Gambler is pretty good. But if you want sheer entertainment, I think The Double is one of the best things Dostoevsky ever wrote. It was only his second novel, and before he was sent to Siberia. His first novel Poor Folk had made him a huge star (even though it's no longer thought to be very good). So he thought he'd top that and came out with The Double which was so weird and out-there that everybody immediately pronounced him a has-been. It's complete genius, though, and very funny.

Edit: if on the other hand you want the classics then Crime and Punishment is likely your best bet. It's all about what happens when someone takes an idea to its extreme conclusion and acts on it. And it's his easiest big novel from a story point of view.

Picked this up after recently finishing The Selfish Gene, as I remembered what a thrilling read Crime and Punishment was.

Dostoyevsky is funny, thought-provoking and anxiety-inducing as ever.
Unlike some other authors, he rarely makes characters whose viewpoints he disagrees with into cheap caricatures with bad arguments.
He is intellectually honest and provides unprecedented (at least for its time) psychological insight into his complex characters.

I have always been sad to finish Dostoyevsky's books, but as the Penguin Classics version is around 1000 pages long, it will hopefully take a bit longer this time around.

Now, while the narrative style is different in the later of these books, if you enjoy NFU, I recommend both Crime and Punishment and Demons.
I see Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, and Demons/The Possessed as unified by a core set of ideas.
In the first, Dostoevsky states his claims. Crime and Punishment is a case study of what would happen should an individual act upon the ideas of his (Dostoevsky’s) time, and Demons extrapolated this to societal scale.
I may not be in the majority, but I think Demons is by far his best.

Take Dick for example: whether his writing deals with "the highest kind of truth" is not important to me. I've read just about everything he's written because I enjoy his writing.

I think this is equally true for Dostoevsky, Conrad, and other acclaimed writers. When I read those authors, I have an emotional reaction. It's not research. I didn't come away from Crime and Punishment with a better understanding of why people commit murder. I don't understand "nautical psychology" any better for having read The Shadow Line. I was moved by those novels. I'd say that makes them entertainment.

I don't think acclaimed literature belongs in a different category than teenage supernatural romance. Twilight elicit an emotional response from its audience just like Ubik does. The emotions, technique, and the audience could hardly be more different, but I see no reason that one of those novels should be categorized as "base entertainment" and the other as "high art". They're both entertainment.

Some literature may contain a thesis but, in my opinion, it mostly doesn't. If someone has to "study" a novel to "get the point" then that novel has failed, at least with regard to that reader.

Just my opinion.

More on topic: I enjoy Roberto Bolano's thoughts on Philip K. Dick: http://www.electriccereal.com/roberto-bolano-on-philip-k-dic...

(I did eventually read the whole thing, of course, and I'm glad I did.)

  East of Eden - John Steinbeck
  Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
  Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl
  Deep Work - Cal Newport
  The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint
  The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson
  Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
  Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person - Hugh Prather
  Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
  I Heart Logs: Event Data, Stream Processing, and Data Integration - Jay Kreps
  Kafka: The Definitive Guide - Neha Narkhede
  Effective Java - Joshua Bloch
  Algorithms - Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne

I'm not a great fan of serious literature, but I've read a bit here and there and I think the above should be blindingly obvious to anyone who's read at least as little as I have (basically, Crime and Punishment, three or four pages from The Idiot and Gorsky's The Flaming heart of Danko). Or, anyone who's listened to the music (hello, Chaikovsky? Black Swan? You wanted feelsies?) or watched the movies (Tarkovsky) etc.

I think in the past the literature and the art in general would have been where Western people learned about Russians (and everyone else not in the West, also, but the Russians have a lot of literature). It's a bit of a shame if this has really been replaced by tinny stereotypes promulgated by Hollywood.

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky - I went back to Dostoevsky because I needed a break from business books... Something to distract me from work in the evenings. Dostoevsky's overly descriptive narrative does a great job of transporting my mind to 19th-century Russia and far, far from my work and other present-day concerns.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown, and Deep Work by Cal Newport - Pairing them together because they both reminded me the same important lessons: 1) Do fewer things and do them better, 2) Being overly busy is not a sign of success.

Likewise, I’m not sure I fully understand Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc. I enjoy their work, to be sure, but I’m afraid not to the extent Americans enjoy it. Thus far I have not found an American novelist who would be anywhere near Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. My favorite US novel is “Grapes of Wrath”. Absolutely beatiful work when read in the language it was written in.

My favorite Russian novel is “War and Peace”. Russian school children are forced to read it when they’re like 15, and they don’t get it, of course. After re-reading it at 40 I was blown away. Such immense depth, such masterful pacing and character development.

I have recently re-read Crime and Punishment, another one of those books Russian school children are forced to read with no hope of understanding. I was likewise impressed with depth and sheer brutality of it. I wouldn’t say Raskolnikov hated the world. That’s not quite right, too black and white. Dostoevsky operates in the gray area. Raskolnikov was, at his core, a kind young man (see eg his empathy for Sonya), but an extreme nihilist, and he was stuck between a rock and a hard place, from which his nihilism offered him no escape. Struggling to reconcile his ideology with his humanity, he commits a stupid crime, for which his humanity makes him suffer immensely. If he really did despise everything, he would sleep well.

- The Holy Bible
- Moby Dick by Melville
- The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
- The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas
- The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
- The Qur'an
- The Prince by Machiavelli
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
- The Confessions by Saint Augustine
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
- The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric
- Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andric
- Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque
- The Divine Comedy by Dante

--- This list totals out at 311.14EUR and has 23 books.
[0] - https://www.bookdepository.com/
[1] - https://www.betterworldbooks.com/

Another book I've read many times is Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

I've read Asimov's cycle of Foundation many times. Don't know how many, actually.

I've also read several times some philosophy classics, particularly Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, Apology and Republic.

Then there are many books that I've read at least twice, almost all considered classics (from 1984 to LoTR, Great expectations to Tom Sawyer, Crime and punishment to Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, etc).

Les Miserables, Hugo

Several stories by Kafka

Dubliners, Joyce

He does make the point that most images are unnecessary. But then he puts dozens of unnecessary images into his web page! Even he doesn't follow that advice.

It makes life as boring as work.

These methods are meant for teams working towards a common objective, where anything extraneous to the OKRs is considered a distraction. This has its shortcomings (I've met way too many project managers who seem to be so absorbed by metrics they fail to see what is right in front of their noses). It's most definitely useful is this context, but not in life.

Consider: the author has set himself to read 20 books per year. Suppose this is double of his standard. What he will do to fulfill his OKR? He's not going to choose a difficult read such as Ulysses, or an existential crisis inducing book such as Crime and Punishment, he will go for what is more superficial and easier to read, because his goal is not to be transformed by what he reads, his goal is to read 20 books.

The crucial layer of meaning is lost when we project-manage ourselves. Life is more akin to a poem than it is to a project.

Can anyone recommend other similar works of literature? I haven't read many books like this but I found Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolfe by Herman Hesse to be on the same lines (deal with existentialism).

Covers are interesting. The imprint has gone for a “classic oil painting” style as a general rule of thumb and those need to be PD as well of course. That’s trickier than it sounds in the US, as to be PD they need to have been published in a book in the US pre-1923. For example, the edition of Crime and Punishment I worked on has an Edvard Munch as cover art.[1] I managed to find that reprinted in a copy of “Scandinavian Art”, published in the US in 1922.[2] Unfortunately just looking at the PD tags on commons.wikimedia isn’t good enough as they rarely provide proof and anyone can edit them; the project could get into real copyright trouble without having proof of PD.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky_crime-an...

[2] https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t8x93xv1g?urlappe...

I didn't get the sense that I'd extracted everything from "The Grand Inquisitor" (excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov), but I got the feeling it was just because it was more deep and compact, but would yield fruit with further study (even as an American).

It lets you set how many words are visible at a time, so you can use it to do the exercises jakewolf mentioned.

I could read Crime and Punishment at about 600-700 wpm (around 200-300 is normal) and I think I still had good comprehension. You can also adjust the speed as you go if passages get more difficult.

Also, when I read normally, I don't read linearly. I scan a page and narrow in on interesting words. Usually, if the material isn't too tricky, I can understand a paragraph very quickly this way. It is how I read online.

Finally, it really helps to think about what the author is saying, especially if I try to anticipate what's next. This gives me something to compare and contrast with, which makes me retain and understand what I read much better.

I've just doublechecked that the official English translation is good indeed, I haven't got first hand knowledge though
https://www.quora.com/I-intend-to-read-the-Witcher-books-but...

My knowledge of Slavic literature limits mostly to the Polish and some Russian authors, despite that I can recommend a Czech satire book that I liked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk

Other than that, Czeslaw Milosz for the poetry, Henryk Sienkiewicz has some great novels about the history of Poland (The Trilogy and The Teutonic Knights are damn hooking and intense), Zofia Kossak Szczucka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zofia_Kossak-Szczucka) is another solid historical writer. I am aware however that my tastes in literature are somewhat eclectic.

Russian Lit: Nikolai Gogol for the stories, Solzhenitsyn for the Gulag Archipelago, and of course War and Peace (Tolstoy) and Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky). Reserve some weeks for the last two though, heh ;)

Any help you need, just shoot me an email (in the profile), but I'm not an expert by any means :P

BTW, for those buying, unless you're a reporter, I highly recommend the large size. If you look at the notebooks of great men, most tend to be closer to the larger size. Michelson is the one that sticks in my mind, since I walked past those notebooks every day for 7 years.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/177606/crime-and-punishment/...

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-karamazov-brothe...

Constance Garnett seems good too. Most of her translations are in public domain.

(For further insight into this aspect of the human psyche I recommend Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.)

Or, perhaps he's an emotionless robot playing the role of a remorseful human being. If so, I think it's about time. It's not as if Plan A was working out well for anyone.

Requiescat in Pace

For lighter reading, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661

It was the best class I took in undergrad, it was so interesting to read and discuss. I think I needed to be in that class, though, to really get what I got out of it - so perhaps it is ok to come across them later in life. They almost require experience.

I think if you watch an interview with DFW you will realize just how much he has thought of just about every facet of modern, entertainment-centric western society - all coming together in Infinite Jest which is the most depressing book I've ever read (he later committed suicide, so it might have been the most depressing contemporary book ever written either). Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness models an entire planetary civilization with no fixed sex (written in 1969, mind you), which I found very eye-opening. Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (as well as Crime and Punishment) are extraordinarily psychological and philosophical - ethics, free will, and God are centric. Both Steinbeck and Vonnegut have multiple books I'd recommend, but East of Eden by Steinbeck is an all-time favorite tackling good and evil (honestly Nietzsche in novel); Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut (just a notch above Heller's Catch-22) is the embodiment of darkness and absurdity. Take an anti-war sentiment and an author willing to tiptoe to the border of sanity and insanity and the result is SH5. It is truly brilliant, and as someone who is fortunate enough to not have ever been impacted greatly by wartime, it is equally eye-opening.

Honorable mention (a book I have read more recently) goes to Tom Wolfe with The Bonfire of the Vanities. This book combines the legal system (police and prosecutors), personal greed and ambition (Wall Street bond salesman), racism (Media biases), and class structures and privilege in a hard hitting social critique on 80s New York City. Everything between its covers is key to understanding how the world actually works.

This turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated. Hopefully it is helpful!

I was a little disappointed that I only got through 24 this year. My goal was 75, which would have represented a stretch beyond the 53 I got through last year. But it turns out that I picked a couple of really long books this year, AND I spent a lot more time this year doing stuff like taking Coursera classes and what-not, which cut into my reading time.

All in all, I guess it just shows that a simple number like "titles read" isn't really all that meaningful. :-)

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

I really want to read this. Maybe in 2017.

If I could add to this list:

- everything by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that was translated to English.

- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

- Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

- Ward No 6 by Anton Chekhov

The most unsympathetic of his characters are also portrayed quite sympathetically and compassionately. The reader really understands how they can do the reprehensible things they do, can understand what brought them to this end, and even sympathize with them. They are the polar opposites of the flat, two dimensional cardboard cutouts that pass for characters in most other books.

Instead, Gibbons could have picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment or some other work of art if he wanted to acquire a sense of the desperation felt by "the disenfranchised of society." It is not a stretch to imagine that it probably sucks.

Great art can teach us about life without the burden of living through the worst it has to offer. Trying to force traumatic experiences on yourself at the expense of others is not art but stupidity.

One factor that I think contributes to the Asshole Ethos common among programmers is this idea that great men of genius cannot be held to the same moral standards as mere mortals. This idea, combined with an inflated sense of self-worth, makes for a host of Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds wannabes, convinced that their special nature absolves them from social norms and responsibility.

The Raskolnikov-ian egoists ought to read Crime and Punishment...

I can fortunately say that in my experience, few programmers are assholes in person. Online forums are another matter. :)

He helps you see what's right in front of you, namely that people do wrong things not because they are evil or bad, but because they are weak.

Once you understand people as inherently weak, that they do stupid shit because they are essentially helpless, not because they're bad or evil or cruel, it becomes so much easier to forgive.

Mental toughness is all about forgiving and forgetting, and you learn to forgive only by accepting that people are weak, that people are essentially incapable of doing what's right.

Here one of my favorite quotes from the book:

“She is so unhappy! Ah, how unhappy! She believes there must be righteousness everywhere. She expects it. She doesn't see that it's impossible for people to be righteous and she is angry at it.”

If you don't set a goal, you might just procastinate over it.

> Consider: the author has set himself to read 20 books per year. Suppose this is double of his standard. What he will do to fulfill his OKR? He's not going to choose a difficult read such as Ulysses, or an existential crisis inducing book such as Crime and Punishment, he will go for what is more superficial and easier to read, because his goal is not to be transformed by what he reads, his goal is to read 20 books.

- It is okay to read 10 books or X number of pages. Now, you actually started reading right! One's aim should not be to complete the KR for the sake of completion, but rather pushing yourself to do more, slowly improvements will be visible.

They finished on the last possible day. The publisher cunningly closed his office that day and ordered all his staff not to receive the manuscript, but Dostoevsky went to the local police station, handed it in, and got a receipt. Thus his career was rescued. And then he and Anna got married.

It's fitting that this high-stakes drama produced The Gambler (a great short book btw), since Dostoevsky had gotten into it in the first place because of his gambling addiction. The marriage was a long and happy one and his life stabilized after that. His books maybe got a tad less exciting though.

Joseph Frank's biography is the best English source but he spends too many pages on this for a Google Books link to be useful. This one works though: https://books.google.com/books?id=1C1K-BnFGFIC&pg=PA51&dq=do...

Re serials: it's mind blowing that so many great masterpieces of the novel were written and published that way, and yet are so coherent, Dickens included. How on earth did they do it? But no doubt the non-masterpieces were less coherent.

I feel like with the advent of the internet, shocking concepts/ideas are hard to come by. I'm sure ideas in the book were provocative "back then," but nowadays, not so much.

I even watched some lectures on youtube discussing the book, which brought to light a thing or two, but still nothing of significance for me.

When reading Crime and Punishment in school, I remember specifically saying, "I have no idea how to pronounce a whole bunch of stuff in here and I'm going to need to talk about it, so I'm going to specifically come up with a pronunciation." Without that conscious effort, I simply wouldn't have tried to vocalize the names whatsoever, despite that being my standard method of reading.

And to be clear, I can not sub-vocalize, but it's just... uncomfortable.

Imagine you're friends hook you up on a blind date with someone described as "charismatic, supermodel looks, professorial brains". And you turn up, thinking "OK, Blind Date you have 30 minutes to impress me, or I'm outta here." That's what it's like picking up Tolstoy or Hugo and saying "if I'm not hooked after 30 pages, I'm just going to quit reading".

You need to bring something to the reading. Just as you expect Tolstoy to be interesting, so he expects you to be rather knowledgable about 19th Century European history, Christian philosophy, farming practices amongst serfs in Tsarist Russia. You can still fall in love with War and Peace without that knowledge (as I did), but it will take more effort from you and thus might take more than 30 pages.

And Tolstoy expects you to make, and to want to make, the effort to think about what he's writing. Dan Brown expects you to be time-pressed or naive - either unable or unwilling to challenge even his most basic assertions about history. So he writes for his audience, as Tolstoy writes for his. Tolstoy's motivations were closer to evangelism and pushing a political agenda. Dan Brown's are more about becoming rich.

And if all you are thinking while reading the book is "what am I getting from this?" then you're never going to enjoy it as you otherwise might. I read Crime and Punishment because I picked up quickly as I left the house for the airport. Stuck on a plane with nothing else to do, I slogged through the opening section, trying to cope with weird names and an alien culture. But that book, caused me to get into lots of other Russian literature, become Christian, and ultimately inspired some of the conversations that lead me to marrying my wife. I doubt anyone can say that about a Stig Larsson or James Patterson pageturner.

The story is better than that, though. He was working on one of his great novels as a serial (Crime and Punishment, I think), so he had to keep writing that during the day. But he had to produce another novel at the same time in order not to lose his future royalties to this publishing contract, which he had signed to pay off his own gambling debts. He was in despair, but a clever friend found the star pupil at the local shorthand academy and Dostoevsky dictated The Gambler to her in the evenings while she got it down in shorthand (a new technology at the time) and later transcribed it. They only had a few weeks, and finished it at the last minute, but the publisher had cunningly closed his office that day. He was no match for Anna, however, who took the manuscript to the nearest police station and got a receipt, rescuing Dostoevsky's career. Then he married her.

    - Economics
      - Micro
      - Macro
      - "Applied" - stock markets, credits, all that stuff - how it works, etc. (I know almost nothing about it)
    - Knowledge about societies - how they form, how they function, etc.
    - Bayesian probability (working on it right now, thanks to AI Class), set theory, maybe category theory
    - Control theory (I do really, really regret I didn't care about this at university)
    - Biology
      - Genetics 101 & blood groups (I forgot all this stuff since high school)
      - Nutrition 101
    - First aid
    - Pretty much whole physics (Feynman's lectures sitting on my bookshelf and waiting ;))
    - History
      - of civilization, especially Roman history
      - of science, technology and enterpreneurship
      - of modern geopolitical structures
    - Geography
      - World energy infrastructure
      - How many resources do we have, where they are, how fast we use them
      - How the world trade works
    - Literature
      - "Homeless People"
      - "Crime and Punishment"
      - ... and then some other good books

From the technical side (which is actually the main topic ;)), I keep all of this in plain text; it used to be .txt files somewhere on my hard drive, now it's in Org Mode.

English writers that want to avoid what happens to a Russian family name when involving several members (it's complicated) take the smart way out and do it like this:
"after the Isaev family relocated" [1] https://theamericanreader.com/4-june-1855-fyodor-dostoevsky-...

But the reviewer at the guardian (or is it the writer of the book?) goes for "When the Isaevas moved" when writing about husband and wife. If you can't get the surnames right, how much trust should a charitable reader extend towards the review?

If you stumbled across "Hemingway she wife" in an essay on Papa's love life biography, instead of "Hemingway's wife" how much trust would that carry?

Source: I first read the D-dude at nine years of age, in the original, and then went back to him on multiple occasions. What a downer. Also, genius. I prefer Pushkin, the only optimist of Russian literature, but you gotta respect Dostoevsky: how much ahead of the time his realism was, and what an influence he left. And then lots of people simply enjoy his work. If you haven't read "Crime and punishment", strongly recommended.

As for his love life, I read many opposing viewpoints, but I prefer to limit my judgement to the work, not the person. Too messy. Unreliable sources.

If you're interested in Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation methodology, check this out: http://columbiajournal.org/translation-lecture-richard-pevea...

> Pevear explained that they first began translating when they happened to both be reading Crime and Punishment at the same time – Pevear in English, Volokhonsky in Russian – and they compared sentences and saw how radically different they were. Since then, they have developed a system: Volokhonsky makes the first draft, trying to translate as literally as possible [...], explaining any clichés or colloquialisms. Then Pevear looks at the “scribble” (as Volokhonsky calls it), and he “puts it into English” (Pevear said, sighing). Pevear asks Volokhonsky questions, and, in the creating of the third draft, she answers them. Finally, before sending anything off to their editor, Pevear reads the English version out loud while Volokhonsky follows along in the original Russian text.

House Of Leaves (Mark Danielewski)

- Paradise Lost

- The Divine Comedy

- The Aeneid

- Moby Dick

- Middlemarch

- Othello & at least the lesser Henriad

- Any of several Russian novels, of which I've read none (War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment probably being the biggest)

- Kafka's The Trial

- The Canterbury Tales (I've read Sir Gawain & The Green Knight but not this, WTF is wrong with me?)

- Don Quixote

For me personally however I think Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment more or less informed my world-view from a very young age and continues to do so.

Hemingway himself considered himself pretty influenced by Russian authors. It's often speculated that his terse writing was in part influenced by Constance Garnett's translations of them.

The problem with this I see is the KR itself, not Objective. In 2019 I choose similar Objective which pushed me towards finishing books I didn't enjoy or valuable, so I decided to set the KR as number of pages read or just 30 minutes a day.

If you need a deep(er) view of a murderer's soul, you open Crime and Punishment, also a literary work and not a piece of academic research, and find it there.

For SF in 1970s, there was no such higher tier; there was no literary futurology. Lem himself was one of the biggest figures in the field of literary futurology, framed as SF. "Hard SF", like the works of Peter Watts or Greg Egan, did not yet exist.

30% of the meaning is not there because you don't have the same cultural background. Another 15-20% is lost in translation. What remains is still formidable, but nowhere near as good as the original work. I happen to also have recently re-read Crime and Punishment, but in my native Russian, after a gap of some 25 years. I've found it very vivid, engaging, and full of nuance I just wasn't even able see when I was a teenager. Likewise I have fairly recently re-read War and Peace, and it is now my favorite book of all time. When I was much younger it seemed "too long" and extremely boring, because it requires quite a bit of lived experience to fully appreciate, and not just any experience, but experience that only someone who has lived in Russia for an extended period of time (not necessarily originally Russian) would have. Really fundamental, basic things, which Americans just can't even begin to understand. I.e. how the government is perceived there (hint: Tsar-like figure is still perceived as a desirable thing), what it means to have a land war on your soil (Russia had many, some extremely devastating), Russian ideas about patriotism, yet at the same not liking how they do things over there, Russian fatalism, how women are perceived by men and the other way around, etc, etc.

Having spent 20+ years in the US and having traveled quite a bit, I've recently read The Grapes of Wrath. I liked the book, and the use of language in it (it almost reads like poetry at times), but I very strongly suspect I didn't quite "get" it to the extent that an American would, for the same reasons I alluded to above. And I have vastly more "American" lived experience than most Americans have "Russian".

(Then again, the main character had also recently murdered an old lady, so the main problem is not in the apartment.)

[1] Examples of essay topics: http://velikayakultura.ru/temy-shkolnyh-sochineniy/temyi-f-m...

That's also how I got to read Crime and Punishment twice: in Russian, when I was in school in Ukraine, and then in English, at a high school in Brooklyn the very next year. Had a blast both times, really.

Our AP English teacher that quarter was a six-foot-something metalhead whose name I, unfortunately, forgot. But his class is one of my warmest memories of those years. One time he took the whole class to a Russian restaurant (as an optional excursion, we paid for ourselves) just to give the kids a better immersion into the Russian culture (the school was right next to a Russian-speaking neighborhood anyway). Even for me, it was something that created a real-life context for the fictional work, and of course made it more exciting.

So I'd say - assigned reading is not necessarily the death knell for a work of art. It really does depend on the teacher. However, statistically, it probably kills it for most people, so in the very least, there's no point in having a nationwide standard.

Which brings me back to OP's point: the problem isn't just that there's assigned reading in ex-USSR countries, it's that everyone has the same assigned reading. That has a devastating effect, I think. At least in the US, even if a book is destroyed in the classroom, there are decent chances that most of the students won't be affected because they'll have different assigned reading.

It doesn't help that information is embedded structurally in a novel, which makes it harder to tease out. But good fiction (say, Ulysses or Crime and Punishment or Nine Stories) is as rich as any essay or monograph.

It's also not clear that density, in the strict sense, is what I'm after when I read. If so I'd be buried in technical papers, when what I really want is something to tickle my brain; to that end, I wouldn't want to lose any one of arXiv, the Engineering library, or the literature section at Borders.

Of course that might lead you ask "then why are you planning to read it"? To which I can only say "because it sounds interesting and exactly because I haven't read much Russian literature and I want to broaden my horizons a bit". But I'm not reading it because I want to be able to impress some hipster pseudo-intellectuals, or because it's something you're "supposed" to read. I just want to see what it's all about. Same with Crime and Punishment, which I started recently (but got distracted from and set aside temporarily).

Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - to break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for granted.

I agree with that, but I find that fiction from (and set in) Victorian era England has been my primary outlet for thinking about and appreciating the past in that regard. That's certainly not to discredit the Russian stuff you speak of, just saying that reading Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or whatever, isn't the only way to tap into that historical perspective.

It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a Wikipedia article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and suddenly find yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living, breathing bundle of thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably aching to find meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social upheavals of human history.

Indeed. I greatly enjoyed reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and have quite a few of his other works on my list.

Perhaps your problem is less these translators, and more sufficiently complicated literature that needs some time to digest...

I couldn't understand the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary. Dostoevsky has a very eloquent way of writing with very long sentences and complicated grammar, but it's very hard for a non-native speaker to understand.

So, I went to a Russian colleague of mine, who recommended that I try to read "The Master and the Margarita" instead of Crime and Punishment. I found that I could read and mostly understand it, but the plot made no sense.

I told this experience to my Russian teacher, and she laughed uncontrollably. She said that it's true that the grammar in The Master in the Margarita is easier, but you'll never really understand the plot without having lived in the Soviet Union. She said that every element in the story is a jab at some aspect of life or politics from that era.

I continued to stick with short stories by Chekhov and Gogol after that.

For any of you here who may have read it too young I highly recommend going back and reading it again

And then I find myself looking at the website of a restaurant or event space, and need just a phone number or opening hours or so - maybe 10 bytes of actual information - and am buried in mountains of useless blather and "design" and ads and trackers and assorted other random rubbish.

When I started to study Russian, I read one or two of his stories in this book [1], which was great because it has English and Russian versions on opposite pages. I got to enjoy reading in Russian because I didn't constantly have to look up every tenth word in a dictionary.

Russian is a hard language but there are some still harder. To understand magazine articles and carry on simple conversations on arbitrary topics is a time investment of about 600 hours. To read Chekhov and speak really well on advanced topics is about double that, or 1200 hours. Chekhov's style is close to modern Russian and his style of writing is more straightforward than earlier writers. To read Dostoyevsky... well, hell if I know, I can barely make it through the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary even after all this time investment and living in Russia for a few years! It's like a different language.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Stories-Dual-Language-Book-En...

That said, last year, my big thing - outside of "utility" books, were books on running and bike racing. I read things like Running Through The Wall, Born To Run, Slaying The Badger, Running on Empty, Racing Through The Dark, Eat & Run, The Belgian Hammer, Run!, It's Not Just About The Bike and The Secret Race. Fascinating stuff, for anyone who is interested in either running or bicycle racing.

Technical things I am working through are the:

- https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/a... along with the Artin text, writing proofs out by hand and in Lean.

- Seven Sketches in Compositionality: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05316

I recycled them. A book once severed is going to keep shedding pages. It's fine to read once, but probably will not stand up to a second or subsequent reading. On the whole, I'd just as soon not buy books that I'm not going to look into again after the first reading.

Having said that, Crime and Punishment is not really a scarce resource, nor I suppose Infinite Jest or Middlesex. I'd bet that I could buy all three at a used bookstore for less than $30. The author may be stepping up the recycling date for the books, but by how much?

My two cents is that there are some subtleties that are cultural but for the most part its understandable from the reader's perspective as to what the author was getting to. Although google and wikipedia is your friend when it comes to cultural references.