site banner

Friday Fun Thread for May 10, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I may have to add that to my list.

I'm still slowly making my way through Crime & Punishment. I'm some way through Part II. I am enjoying it, but I just haven't felt a lot of motivation to read lately. Was on a huge gaming kick playing through Unicorn Overlord, which I highly recommend. But that's over, so I've been getting back to it a bit.

Sometimes my wife and I have conversations about the human condition, and I use that exact phrase a lot, the "human condition". I don't know when that specific phrase was coined, but it's a subject matter that's been at the core of nearly every enduring work. And Crime & Punishment is rich with it. Although the author has a funny habit of crafting each chapter as a pseudo monologue. Perhaps with a bit of brief narrative to move a character from point A to point B, and once there, we enjoy another 10 to 20 page monologue. Not that it bothers me. These monologues serve as interesting, if unsubtle, character studies. The one a few chapters in where Raskolnikov encounters an alcoholic that opines how he ruined his wife and daughter's lives for love of drink is fairly on the nose.

But it's supposed to be one of the greatest novels ever written, so if you are a Crime & Punishment stan, you can ignore my ignorant impressions of such a great and unimpeachable work.

That's the price for entry in reading Dostoyevsky. It requires a suspension of disbelief when characters go on impossibly long monologues while other characters listen with impossible patience.