C & P

I know I love Crime and Punishment  because I ripped through 95% of it, and have put off finishing it for two weeks. When I'm reading a book I really love, I get depressed as I near the end; I feel like soon I will be on the outside of the story and characters, not wrapped up warmly with them. I'll procrastinate, find excuses not to finish it, I've gone months at a time ignoring a book as it sits there waiting for me to end it. Like having a hard time putting down a horse that has worked the farm relentlessly for 20 years I guess. - XMASTIME

Crime and Punishment is one of my all-time favorite books, and there's an article today about WHY Dostoyevsky wrote the thing in the first place:

All of this, chaotically, courageously, goes into Crime and Punishment, which Dostoyevsky begins in September 1865 while half-starved and sleepless in a hotel in Wiesbaden, having lost all his money at the roulette table. It’s a novel of warrenlike buildings, sooty doors, small rooms that smell of mice and leather. Hallucinations nibble at the edge of reality. Drunken degenerates say limpid and beautiful things. Interior monologues become audible. Above all it’s a novel of subjectivity: the oppression of it, the turgid wrangle of it, the screaming loneliness of it. “Completely unneeded and unexpected details must leap out at every moment in the middle of the story,” wrote Dostoyevsky in his notebook. Raskolnikov’s motives, his redemption or lack thereof, the twists and turns of the plot—red herrings, in the end. Crime and Punishment is about your brain, your poor brain, being the seat of modern consciousness. It’s about how that actually, really, feels.

Amazing where utter genius can come from.