The first was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I've been meaning to read this one for a while, at the very least to put Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors into context. I really got swept up into it, but it also messed with me quite a bit. It's a very disturbing book. The end of my edition has a series of quotes from other authors, and I found Robert Louis Stevenson summed it up pretty nicely for me:
Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of today, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified. - Robert Louis Stevenson
I actually enjoyed it more than the second book I read last month, Dostoevsky's considered masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. That one I read more as an outsider observing. I liked the way it was structured, it seemed a sort of precursor to James Joyce's Ulysses in some ways. But it didn't consume me the way Crime and Punishment did. Also, when I reached the not-ending, I was as baffled and disappointed as the girls who sat behind me in the theater for The Fellowship of the Ring. What sort of ending is that? Apparently Dostoevsky had planned a trilogy he hadn't lived to write, so we only get a single volume. Since just that book is the size of all of The Lord of the Rings, I admire his ambition.
The last book I read in June was lighter fare: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is the third book in her Sharing Knife series. I found the first two books a little underwhelming (engaging enough, but no where near the level of her other work), but in this book things start to get interesting as her characters begin to explore the mechanics of how their magic works. I like a book where magic is just another sort of science with rules to be discovered and applied. The setting on a river boat on a fantasy version of the Mississippi I liked as well. This series is looking up for me, I'll be interested to see where she takes this next.
In non-book-related news, my grocery delivery service just went out of business. They had been making a lot of little adjustments in the last few months to compensate for the rising costs of food and fuel, but they've given up. This is a bit of a blow to me; I don't actually have time in the week to go to the grocery store. Honestly, none. What used to take ten minutes on the computer on Tuesday and ten minutes putting food away on Wednesday is now going to involve at least an hour at a time I'm neither working or homeschooling. Which means it has to come out of my writing time. We're going to make it a family activity, partly so that the boys can be involved in it and get a sense of what things cost and how we make food decisions, but mostly because it's a huge drag going out to stores and I'm not doing it on my own.
I hate shopping in stores in general. I had to get clothes for all of us for one of last week's parties so we went to Kohls. Now I love Kohls.com. I can search just for three-quarter sleeve tunic cotton shirts, and that's all I see on the screen, and I can pick what I want in five minutes. I spent nearly an hour walking in circles before I found anything remotely like what I was looking for among racks and racks of not-what-I-was-looking-for. Man, I hate shopping.
OK, rant done. I have to finish cleaning my house so I can get back to the outline. I think I figured something out while I was half-asleep this morning that will resolve something that was nagging at the back of my mind...
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