Gonna type something out now while I wear this moisturising face mask...

So I liked this, and there are lots of great, memorable bits in it... It definitely has enduring artistic and aesthetic merit. At the same time, it feels quite meandering and doesn't have a strong narrative throughline. The parts of the book about Marmeladov were originally conceived as a separate book and it kind of shows. However, something would be lost if the book was trimmed down to just the central murder plot. So I have quite conflicting feelings.

This felt like the longest not particularly long book I've ever read. I think that's partly because my copy is a relatively large format 500-odd-page deluxe version that is 700-odd-pages in the standard paperback but I think it's also a symptom of the book just generally being quite difficult to read, not very flow-y on a sentence to sentence level and also, as I mentioned above, not always having a strong narrative thrust. I've started reading Anna Karenina using two different translations and in both Tolstoy's writing massively flows better than this.

On the one hand, I think this book has endured partly as a kind of literary meme - it's quite dated in terms of writing style, it's clearly rooted in the literary and intellectual environment it was published in, which will mean little to the modern reader. I don't think it's a top-tier bucket list classic. On the other hand... there are some really vivid, top-tier scenes and you get a really clear picture of the deprivation of the Russia of that time. And some of the intellectual/philosophical aspects of it are still kinda interesting today.

So I'd say overall, glad I read it, perhaps not one to put right at the top of the classics bucket-list, not in the A-tier, but like a solid B-tier.

That's really cool that the days of the week match up this year. I'll look into it.

Here's the schedule for January:

Tuesday 10 January - Letter 1
Friday 13 January - Letter 2
Saturday 14 January - Letter 3
Sunday 15 January - Letter 4
Friday 20 January - Letter 5 and 6

Letter 3 is labelled 13, 14 January, which I think means it was drafted across both days and posted on 14 January so let's read it on the day it went in the post.

ERE knows how to keep a thread updated.

This isn't the easiest book to read, is it? I've decided to just plough through and if I miss the occasional bit of meaning then so be it.

The gender related stuff in today's (technically yesterday's since it's now past midnight) letter feel like it's still pretty relevent today.

Got to spread it out over a week. If you write everything in one letter one afternoon, you'll have nothing to do tomorrow.