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Aaron

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Aaron is Currently Reading

Aaron is currently reading

Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

by Meera Syal

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Jan 13, 2026 05:59PM

Aaron is currently reading

Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in May 2021

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Aaron said: " This may have just shot up the charts to become one of the best books I've ever read. At first glance, not much happens in this book: a young man plots a murder, commits a murder, and is then consumed by guilt for the rest of the runtime. Everything This may have just shot up the charts to become one of the best books I've ever read. At first glance, not much happens in this book: a young man plots a murder, commits a murder, and is then consumed by guilt for the rest of the runtime. Everything else is ancillary: his greatest ally, a fellow student whom Raskolnikov hardly notices; his mother and sister's entrapment and suffering; the desperate, insane poverty and vice into which so many characters sink. I felt the simple horror of their daily lives pressing down on me. I saw the miserable, cramped quarters in which they lived. I endured the disgust of their single outfit, more rags than garment, and their all-too-tenuous grip on their own sanity.

Dostoyevsky stares straight at the most wretched parts of the human condition and refuses to look away. The realism is relentless. The dirt, the filth, the cracked and worn furniture, the meager meals, all jumped out at me far more vividly than any other book has managed in quite some time. So many other books committed to worldbuilding and realism do it by exhaustively explaining the colour and shape of every single item in every single room. Here, it is done in broad strokes, and is all the more impactful for it.

And the dialogue! Quite often I fret that my 'inner reader', the voice in my head actually reciting the words I read, is quite flat and does not convey tone. It was impossible not to convey the madness, the despair, the grief and the guilt all these characters felt. I heard their horrible shrieks, the quaver in Raksolnikov's voice, the weakness as they can hardly keep on their feet from the weight of their situation.

I approached this book with a little bit of wariness. It was very long, and my last Dosty-outing - Notes From The Underground - was incredibly hard going in the first half (though it rose to excellence in the second). I needn't have worried. 650 pages flowed by like water. I'm already certain, at some point in my life, that I'll read this again. I know I'll be talking about it plenty, too. ...more "

May 20, 2021 10:52PM · see review