the brothers karamazov – fyodor dostoevsky – 3 stars

the worst time to undertake an ambitious reading project is the last month of your college life as you know it. the last month in the house you lived in through graduation and on into the summer of your first year as an adult. maybe that’s why i read this book over two whole months instead of three or four weeks. maybe that’s why i didn’t terribly enjoy the whole first half of meandering exposition, no matter how well-written and composed. perhaps it is no coincidence that having time to myself in a new apartment and suddenly zipping through the final third of this 780 page tome occurred in tandem; or perhaps the real action doesn’t start until well into the story and that’s when it gets more like a cliffhanger and less like grass growing on a hill. i did like it though. dostoevsky is skillful and the characters were certainly developed well in those hundreds upon hundreds of pages. how am i to really judge, though, since by the time i had finished it i could hardly remember the beginning. that said, i still think it’s one of the better books i’ve read about dumptrucks.