So, I’ve been on a bit of a 1800s literature tear since Becoming The Main Character did an episode on “A Christmas Carol” last year.

I’m 80% done with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment.

This is the third book of his I’ve read. Man, could this guy write. The dialogue is so on point. You really get a sense of who the different characters are and what makes them different. I’m blown away by how he’s able to channel different characters personas. The characters are timeless as I can see bits of them in people today . And it is surprisingly readable for being written in the 1800s and translated from another language.

Here’s a collection of thoughts & passages on the book:

The best writers put language around concepts you know, but haven’t been able to explain yet. For example, here he talks about how some people age beautifully:

Crime and Punishment was published 20 years after Marx’s Communist manifesto. So many of the arguments for / against these ideals that we hear today are reflected in this 1860 novel:

Another thing in the Russian zeitgeist at the time was the emancipation of the serfs – which happened to coincide with the emancipation of slavery in the US. Both of which came at the heels of the industrial revolution, which had me thinking how long those events would have been delayed if we didn’t have the industrial revolution first. Another argument for technological progress…

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This passage really hit home on how your world changes when you lie, and why you need people in your life you can be completely honest with.

And I had these two pages bookmarked for great writing: