on Latitudes with Dostoyevsky

My friend who lives across the hall from me is taking Russian Lit this semester and they just finished reading Crime and Punishment which I do think is probably one of the best books I've ever read. However, the operative and most crucial part of that sentence the fact that the verb to read is in the past tense. Reading Crime and Punishment is not kicks and giggles. My beloved English teacher, to whom I will always be grateful, made us read it my senior year of high school and the whole time I was reading it, I remember feeling so heavy and sluggish. At the time, I was also writing a paper about human testing performed by the Nazis on prisoners in concentration camps, and I know that when I finished writing that essay, the feeling of relief was incredible. I hadn't realised how much of that burden I had taken upon myself while writing the essay. The same feeling goes for Crime and Punishment. Reading it is not fun and games, but the feeling of having completed that incredible feat is quite unparalleled. Anyway, to bring this meditation on random things full circle, watching her slog her way through the novel was delightful because I vicariously relived it with her and knew her excitement when she finished as well as, of course, her disgust with the terrible, horrible, vomitous, nauseating epilogue that Dostoyevsky wrote. (Holy jesus, what was he thinking!?)