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Yes, I read Crime and Punishment about one year after The Brothers Karamazov. I think The Brothers Karamazov is a great book.

Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile", Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", Robert Greene's "48 Laws of Power" were some of the good books I read this year.

Dostoyevsky is a great. Still haven't read The Brothers Karamazov.

The big ones for me:

1) Antifragile by Taleb (Skin in the Game is so far excellent as well)
2) The Border Trilogy by McCarthy
3) The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
4) East of Eden by Steinbeck
5) Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut

To add a conflicting voice, my own opinion is that Constance Garnett's translation of The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky's best work for English readers.

The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky, without doubt. Seriously, the chapter with the Legend of the Great Inquisitor forced me to ask myself what was the meaning of "freedom", and this in turns urged me to reconsider a lot of beliefs I had hold before.

If you enjoy The Brothers Karamazov I couldn't recommend one of Dostoevsky's other books enough: Notes from the underground. IMO a must read for any intellectual that has ever struggled with anything from self-deprecating thoughts to superiority complexes.

I've received The Brothers Karamazov, and found it to be my new favourite book.

"The Brothers Karamazov" - Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Perhaps the very first existentialist novel ever written. Dostoevsky was an existentialist before anyone knew what existentialism was.

I also couldn’t get into Crime and Punishment, and I read a lot of books and loved The Brothers Karamazov. The idea of just quitting books that you enjoy is really important... for me at least, I feel like I get more out of the top 10% of books that I read than I get out of the bottom 50%. Sometimes a great book only clicks when you’re 1/4 of the way through it, though.

Have you tried? I just reread the brothers karamazov at 29. I first read it when I was 22.

There a lot of it that I understand better, or differently, because I'm older.

The idea is to reread good things. Those usually have depth.

Actually, PG wrote about this: http://paulgraham.com/know.html

I really like this idea but I think it would be nice to the recommendations to a specific language. After adding

- The Brothers Karamazov

- Infinite Jest

- Asterix the Gaul

I get a bunch recommendations for Spanish books (which I can't read).

I read Crime and Punishment after reading The Brothers Karamazov.

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

Fiction: tie between Of Human Bondage by W.Somerset Maugham or The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

Non-Fiction: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Business: Rework by Jason Fried - one of the best in a long time

The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. At the time I didn't realize that it changed me, but looking back on it, the perspectives I learned from it fundamentally how I viewed and understood other people.

I often hear people boasting about their "speed reading" skills and then I ask them what sort of books they read, turns out speed reading and having "good retention rate" is easy if you're reading crap. I could also speed read Clive Cussler, Stephen King, and JK Rowling.

I love Philosophy and classic literature and I've yet to meet anyone that's managed to speed read Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", and then tell give me a detailed description of the plot, themes, artistic merit, and so on. Similarly with books like Ulysses. There's no possible way to speed read that book because it's so rich with allusions, references to religion, art, mythology, and philosophy. If you tried to "speed read" it, you would be missing half the point of reading it in the first place.

Reading great books isn't about numbers, you don't get rewarded for how many classics you read in a year. Reading great books is about slowly absorbing all the riches inside, something that just cannot happen if you're rushing. I've read The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain 4 or 5 times and each time I learn something new and gain a deeper understanding of psychology and life. I find it more rewarding to read and re-read the classics slowly, writing notes, using a critical guide (or book of companion essays), than smashing through as many crappy novels or modern popular non-fiction books (The Power of Now of any of Malcom Gladwells books are typical fodder for todays readers).

You can hide messages in whitespace. Think badly formatted MS Word documents of The Brothers Karamazov by F. Dostoyevsky.

Having just published a book, and going through a couple of alpha and beta reader groups, I look at my experiences, the stack of books by my nightstand, and realize: most people do not buy books to read them

They buy books for the promised experience they'll have owning them. I think most of us heavy readers are not honest enough with ourselves to admit it, but we're not enamored with the ideas in books as much as the experience. An unread book is the promise of a good time yet to come.

I don't know about the Rule of 50. I know that some of the best reads I've had were a struggle for a good, long while until I could finally get into the mind of the author. I also know that some really awful books were a struggle too -- and they didn't get better.

The problem here is that everybody has authors they are easily able to follow. The text just sort of flows. For me, Dean Koontz was like that for a while. It got to the point I started believing a machine was writing these things. They were enjoyable, easy-to-read, action-packed, and completely forgettable. I loved them. Used to call them my "airplane books". Pick one up the morning of travel, finish reading it that day.

Compare that to my current read, "The Brothers Karamazov". I'm struggling, and it's not the author. It's my mind getting aligned with the author that's causing the problem. Sometimes it takes a lot more than 50 pages for that to happen. A little faith is required.

If I had to come up with a rule, I'd go with Pearl's Rule, except for classics. And I'd add a fallback position: try the audiobook. Many times it's easier to listen to an audiobook half-way and get the general gist of it.

Maybe this is tangential, but sometimes when I go into the bookstore, I ask myself how many of these books were really necessary. They're filling some sort of need, it just isn't for information. The shelves with the most new books are invariably the topics that nobody knows anything about, like business or love.

I guess I'm asking how many authors we really need. I still haven't gotten around to reading The Brothers Karamazov.

The book that changed my life is "The Brothers Karamazov," by Dostoevsky. Nowhere I found such a great depth and insight into the nature of human freedom, and the reading questioned many beliefs I had at the time about human nature and the meaning of life.

I distinctly remember reading and re-reading the chapter telling the tale of the Grand Inquisitor. Only after two or three readings of the whole novel I began to grasp Dostoevsky's answer to the Inquisitor's objections, which are not stated plainly in the text but are instead suggested by the way the narrative unfolds.

I have read many other books by Dostoevsky (my other favorites are "The Devils" and "The Idiot"), but "The Brothers Karamazov" is still my favorite.

Non-Fiction (Science)

  - *The Selfish Gene* by Richard Dawkins

  - *The Righteous Mind* by Jonathan Haidt

  - *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman

Non-Fiction (Social)

  - *The Art of Not Being Governed* by James C. Scott

  - *The Unwinding* by George Packer

  - *People's History of the United States* by Howard Zinn

Fiction

  - *East of Eden* by John Steinbeck

  - *Sometimes a Great Notion* by Ken Kesey

  - *The Brothers Karamazov* by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

edit: formatting

As with other commenters, I don't think this is too bad. A quick reader could easily get through the Shakespeare in an afternoon (and surely most people taking this course would probably have read or seen them before anyway...), and some of the rest are quite short.

The hardest book there, I would say, is "The Brothers Karamazov", which is a masterpiece with a little of everything in it, but it is rather dense in the way that Russian novels, and those by Dostoevsky in particular, tend to be. "Moby Dick" is also quite a weighty tome, but it's not a particularly difficult one to get through. I have no idea about the opera libretti or what miseries having to read them might entail.

What a wonderful selection, though, regardless (and lovely to see one of T.S. Eliot's Greek tragedies in there).

Progress & Poverty (1879) by Henry George

Orthodoxy (1908) by G.K. Chesterton

The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This a very personal opinion based on some popular classic book lists like those found on 4chan /lit/ etc.
(Note: All books are new and I calculated the price from Book Depository [0], you might be able to purchase more from Better World Books [1]):

- 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/

I assume you might be looking for books of a similar (technical) flavour, of which I don't have too many to recommend, I'm afraid. However, here's some (across different genres) that are in my memory at this moment:

Finance/statistics :
The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Math/science history :
Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Physics:
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar

Lit:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Philosophy:
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Any of the upanishads but probably Kena Upanishad, Isha Upanishad, or Prashna Upanishad at first (selected for (relative) ease in readership by yours truly)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (for a gentle introduction into Eastern thought)

I'm missing countless others but this is what I have right now. Thanks for the prompt and happy reading! :)

"Orthodoxy" - GK Chesterton

"The Abolition of Man" - CS Lewis

"The Master and Margarita" - Mikhail Bulgakov

"The Brothers Karamazov" - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Dostoyevsky, Ursula Le Guin, David Foster Wallace (I could truly go on forever, but I think these authors are phenomenal, with themes and meta-themes different from one another).

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'd recommend Steinbeck's East of Eden and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

It took me a long time to wrap my head around literature like this. I read nothing but simple sci-fi and fantasy as a teenager, and it wasn't until I got to university that I tried reading "literature". The first one was The Brothers Karamazov, which I picked up off my dad's shelf. I struggled for 150+ pages, until something clicked - I think I'd tuned into the way Dostoyevsky (or, more accurately, the translator) wrote or something like that. Not everyone has to enjoy this stuff - it's not worth beating yourself up if you don't like it - but I'd encourage you to stick with it for quite a while because, at least in my case, the rewards are more than worth it once you've tuned in. Having said that, I tried to read The Brothers Karamazov again recently and found it terribly histrionic, so there are definitely some books that click more at different times in life.

Our tendency to keep reading even bad books is also (to some degree) a manifestation of the "endowment effect" documented in Dan Ariely's "Predictable Irrational": Once you've forked over money for a book, you value it more simply because it's now yours. Even if it sucks, you'll have an easier time convincing yourself that it is an Important Book.

That said, I think there are cases where you should plow through a book you don't (at first) enjoy. E.g. when a book comes highly recommended by people you trust, or from an author who has delivered in the past. This is especially true for older books that were written for less attention-sapped audiences and have cultural gaps that take getting used to. I'm thinking of Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov." It was highly reccomended by friends with good taste, and I had enjoyed some of his shorter works. Still, it was incredibly slow getting started. But once I had ingested the multi-layered background and got a grip on Russian peasant culture, was one of the more amazing books I've ever read. And could not have been otherwise if not for the investment required to get into it.

Halfway into The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My wife and I are reading Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins.

I am also reading The Brothers Karamazov on my Kindle. I kept seeing so many references to it in other things I was reading and I took that as a sign.

Also just started reading Being Geek by Michael Lopp (of the "Rands in Repose" blog). O'Reilly had the ebook on sale the other day and I couldn't pass it up!