Crime and Punishment, and the long walk back

Dostoevsky gives away the plot almost immediately — the murder happens early, almost casually — and then spends the rest of the novel proving that the act was the easy part. What follows is heat, and fever, and a city that seems to sweat guilt out of its yellow walls.

I'd forgotten how funny he can be, in a horrified sort of way. Raskolnikov's theory of the extraordinary man collapses not under argument but under the ordinary weight of a headache, a fever, a kind word from someone who shouldn't be kind to him.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.

Sonia is the whole moral engine of the book, and she barely raises her voice. It's a novel that argues, finally, that you cannot think your way out of being human — that conscience is not an idea you hold but a body you live in.

Read it in spring with the windows open. It's a winter book that works best when you're warm enough to lend its cold some of your own heat.