Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
From my childhood I’ve been a lazy reader, my brain somehow just retains the important stuff the moment I hear it and given that I find it important then and there. Due to this I never actually built a habit of reading books at all. But now it’s time to start making a habit, to pass my time more productively instead of doom scrolling different social media apps. I sometimes find myself scrolling for random content on YouTube, without any reason, I don’t even have an internal need to watch or consume any content, just out of habit!
Well, I’m just in the middle of reading the book at the time of writing, and I’m quite proud of myself that I’m at page 97 (that’s almost 100 pages!) out of 656 pages (that’s around 14% of the entire book). The part where I am, I cannot say I’m really enjoying, but I’m not, not enjoying it either. I find the book to be mix of two feelings, thrill and depression, and have a feeling that it will be filled with lot of repentment in future, because of what the situation The Protagonist have put himself in.
Expand the spoiler containing section.
Up until whatever I’ve read, I see Dostoyevsky going in depth inside the psyche of Raskolnikov (The Protagonist). The decisions he makes, the blackouts he faces, the state of his mind during the murder, and also hints in some way, why he made the decision he made. I believe the decisions he made, that leads to the event the whole book is centered around, could possibly have one of it’s roots in a childhood trauma, a trauma where he felt helpless and powerless, where a group of individuals bludgingly and repetetively beat a horse to death because the load was too much to bear and the horse wasn’t able to carry them. The horse, being a horse didn’t go down in one blow, and the men becoming angry kept giving blows after blows with whatever they can get their hands on until the poor horse finally gave up on its life.
This time, after many years, this time he is a grown man and can make decisions of his own rather than discussing his every step with an elder (like we are used to in childhood). Subconsciously he wants to fix what he was not able to do back then, and now he sees a similar situation, but in a different context, but analogously similar at the same time and (subconsciously) considers that as one of the reasons to commit the crime.
While reading, I find my word power to be quite weak becuase I see lots of words of which I don’t know meaning of. I now understand why margins in books are important, a good margin space gives you ample space to take notes and give your own comments. Most of the margin space in my case is used in writing the meanings of words I’m encountering for the first time, or have read and used before but don’t know the exact meaning of.