For a book that gets such rave reviews, I am not raving yet. Who exactly decided that Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment should be a classic? Huge error in judgment in my opinion, but what do I know? I spend 40% of my time online looking at
pictures of puppies… so yea, not really one to judge.
But I really, honestly, cannot for the life of me get through this book. CANNOT. It’s been weeks and I’m at a pitiful 26% of completion. For some reason I assumed that Crime and Punishment would be similar to Lolita, swapping pedophilia for murder. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy reading a book centered on pedophilia, and I was wrong; I was hoping to be wrong again about murder.
So far, to my immense disappointment, being inside the head of a murderer has not been quite as enjoyable as I would have hoped. In fact, it’s been downright creepy and disturbing, and has sent me running at full speed into the arms of feel-good favorites, Like Water for Chocolate, 84, Charing Cross Road and Tuesdays with Morrie. Perhaps I will take this as a sign of my sanity and likely low-scoring murder-tendency behavior.
I’ve been lagging a little bit on my book updates recently and to be perfectly frank, it’s because I’ve been reading a sh*t ton of books. No, I don’t usually say things like “sh*t ton of books” and no, there’s no real reason why I’m saying it now. All I know is that every now and then I get this bubbling urgency to toss around a few four-lettered foul words, most likely remnants from my more stressful analyst days where diatribes against Exel were simply preludes to long nights at the office. Despite the misery and torture of life as an analyst, I must miss doing financial analysis or something, because what follows is still somewhat of a mystery to me.
As a preface, do you ever get the feeling after finishing a good book that you’ve lost a good friend? You spend hours and hours getting to know these characters inside-and-out, and one minute you’re listening to another disaster at Taggart Transcontinental and the next minute, Wam Bam Thank you Ma’am, the book is done (this is still just wishful thinking on my part because dammit, Atlas Shrugged is LONG.) Anyway, I had this idea that perhaps there’s some sort of connection between a good book and the amount that you like the main character. For example, did you or did you not love the Sherlock Holmes series? And, did you ever at one point in time wish that Sherlock Holmes were your real-life best friend? Yes, my sentiments exactly.
To test my hypothesis, I chose to run a very simple correlation on Excel between 1) how much I wanted to be BFF’s with the main character and 2) my ultimate rating of the book. Here are my results:
Results: Mildly positive correlation. However, the small sample size really limits any conclusions to be drawn.
Implications:
- I need to read more books.
- I REALLY have too much time on my hands.
