I can’t do Paradise Lost yet.  I just can’t.  I’ve started it.  I blundered through Book One and the first couple pages of Book Two.  But I, too, am afraid of John Milton and I need to plan out my reading of Paradise Lost like Bethany has, but I haven’t had the inclination to get organized on that front yet.  I think I’ll probably need to read it in the late morning, someplace quiet, with a table, and a coffee, and a pen in my hand.  And maybe also a notebook.  So here is what I’ve decided to do, until the fates align for me to make a dent in Milton’s masterpiece: I’m skipping it for a while and I’m moving on to Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment was my second failure of AP English (after The Portrait of a Lady).  I blame it on Anne Rice.  We were assigned to start this one over Christmas Break 1993.  I distinctly remember that we were supposed to read Part One.  I read Part One.  And then I read Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned.  And then it was time to go back to school.  Where I learned that my friends had all finished Crime and Punishment while I was reading vampire pornography for two and a half weeks.  And once school got rolling I simply did not have time to finish it.  I picked up my copy a few days ago and found my “bookmark,” a receipt from Super Crown dated 10/25/93, for the Cliff’s Notes for The Portrait of a Lady.  Yup, I can now put an exact date on when my AP English year started its downward spiral.

What upset me the most about not finishing Crime and Punishment is that I was actually enjoying it.  I liked Part One, but I wanted to read Anne Rice more.  It didn’t even occur to me to read the whole thing over break that year.  I felt super-dumb about that at the time, and I occasionally still do.  But damn, I loved those Anne Rice books.

The premise of Crime and Punishment is that Raskolnikov, a university drop-out living in St. Petersburg, plots to kill a money lender so he can rob her.  He is drowning in desperation and has no money.  At some point he actually does kill the money lender, and her innocent-bystander sister, according to the back of my copy.  From what I remember from class this novel was revolutionary in that it focused on a single character, a villain, and was one of the first novels to utilize stream of consciousness as a narrative technique.  I don’t generally love stream of consciousness, because it lends itself to long paragraphs and run-on sentences, but I am hopeful that this technique in its infancy will be less difficult for me to get through than, say, its later iterations in the pages of Faulkner.

I am very much looking forward to getting into the meat of this book.  I do love the Russians, though my only experience with them was in AP English.  I’ve never let myself buy any other Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy novels, and I don’t know why.  There are plenty of minimally intimidating titles; I didn’t need to jump into War and Peace.  Probably after I finally finish Crime and Punishment that will change.  I guess we’ll just have to see.

Bookshelf picture is from Powell’s City of Books.