My first book of 2017 was “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I was browsing through a bookstore, gift card in hand, with no idea what I was looking for. Finally I gave up after an hour of perusing, pulled out my phone and searched up “books I should read,” and found a thread from reddit which had the most up-voted book being the “The Brothers Karamazov,” so up to the checkout counter I went.
I tried not to read much about this novel beforehand, and I had never ventured into Russian classics before so I had no idea who Dostoyevsky was or what to expect. I went in believing this was a mystery novel about a murder, with some romance sprinkled in based on the excerpt on the back. What I ended up getting was so much more.
Now I am normally a fairly quick reader, but this took me a long time to get through. Every word seemed to have meaning, and if my mind even drifted a little while my eyes were scanning the pages, I would have to go back because I felt like I missed something. The tale being woven by Dostoyevsky about Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons: Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha was so gripping that even though it took me some time to read, I could not put it down. The three brothers are so expertly written that I felt myself in each one of them, and was so wound up in their story that it felt real.
As I mentioned earlier, I was expecting a classic murder-mystery, where a murder happens early on, the book spends the majority of the time following the investigation or trial, while eventually wrapping up nicely at the end. This was not the case, instead I got a philosophy book that had me often stopping to reflect on what I had just read. It had me thinking about life, about religion and human nature. One chapter in particular “The Grand Inquisitor,” was a critique of God made by Ivan to Aloysha. This chapter was beautifully written and even if you do not read the rest of this book, I would recommend at least reading this one chapter. There was a murder-mystery in the book, and there was a trial, but none of that seemed to matter to me by the end. Instead I was left thinking about the fates of the characters and the lessons they had taught me along the way. This is a book I will be re-reading for a long time.
Kurt Vonnegut in “Slaughterhouse Five” states that “There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life….it’s the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.”
Favorite quote: “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
Reading Time Away 