Recreational reading is a luxury rarely afforded in the breakneck pace of our lives. The idea of burning through five hundred pages of Eragon in one night is as obsolete as the two-inch above the knee policy—both practices most certainly did not follow us to high school.

Reading a book cover to cover seems to have become something of a feat, let alone reading for fun. Unless you’re some sort of masochist who would decide to read War and Peace in its entirety in the eighth grade (I’m looking at you, Tim Tang), Lit Charts is a lifeline, Sparknotes a salvation, Shmoop a shining beacon of light, and Cliff Notes a cornerstone.

So when Dr. Thorpe, the vivacious and notoriously deadpan redhead who teaches the senior classes of AP English Literature, handed us Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 550-page epic Crime and Punishment with fair warning of weekly reading checks, a groan as loud as a Sputnik engine rumbled through the room.

“You’re going to want to read this one cover to cover,” she cautioned, “and that means no Sparknotes.” Caught in second-semester senior delirium and having become accustomed to Thorpe’s straight-faced sarcasm, the Sputnik engine put-putted into whole-hearted chuckles. While we all sat in an AP-level course, few had bothered to fully burn through an assigned book since Great Expectations in English 9. But even those laughs died down when we realized that she wasn’t kidding.

Upon participating in a short interview after class, Dr. Thorpe explained just why she had been so insistent on having us read the full text of Crime and Punishment: “All authors, Dostoevsky being no exception, write books with the intention of having all of their words read. The best readers are those who will put in their best effort to understand the primary source, allowing a fuller and deeper understanding and appreciation for the work itself.”

And her particular emphasis on Crime and Punishment is well-warranted. While authors of novels like Ethan Frome take upwards of thirty pages to describe a man walking through a wintery night, Dostoevsky moves his novel along at a comfortably fast pace. Despite the pitfall of having a stereotypical classical novel title of X and Y—see War and Peace, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Marley and Me—Crime and Punishment seems to have transcended all expectations.

Without affording too many spoilers, let’s just say that within Part I, crime indeed happens. Then in Part II and beyond, punishment reasonably follows. Within a mere 86 pages, upwards of ten characters are deeply developed, some meeting very quick demises following their brief introductions. The reader meets the protagonist, Raskolnikov, and follows him around the slums of St. Petersburg. Raskolnikov, is, for a lack of better terms, a Russian Holden Caulfield (on whom I hope to write a dissertation in the foreseeable future). He is a quintessential sewer rat who wanders the streets, stays aloof from those around him, and becomes immersed in his own terrible ideas.

As we trudge with Raskolnikov across archetypal bridges and through motif-driven alleyways, we find ourselves simultaneously loving and hating his character.

Benjamin Zhou ‘16 explains, “It’s important for young readers to sympathize not only with people whom we perceive as ‘do-gooders’ but with people who we don’t necessarily agree with. By stepping unconventionally into the shoes of people who are criminals—people who we wouldn’t normally associate with, we experience novels, plays, or movies in a whole new light.”

Raskolnikov’s case, in particular, should strike a very ambivalent chord. His wild ideas of becoming a hero and illogical means of meeting this end are endlessly frustrating—yet here we are, finding ourselves identifying with his irrationality. Only in walking alongside such a humanized and four-dimensional character through every word in this novel can we begin to understand the otherwise outlandish motives for his behavior. Love or hate Raskolnikov, his journey is compelling, and one that, while verbose, surprisingly doesn’t make the reader want to jump off of a bridge along with (spoiler alert) a tragic secondary character.

So while this will not be a column for the most groundbreaking or objective analyses on books assigned in the Ridge curriculum, I anticipate that this is the first installation of many in which I document my resolution of reading books cover to cover. I will seek to make the next few analyses more substantive and content-based, but for this installation, the principle of reading for understanding and sharing is my ultimate goal. And hopefully it inspires you to do the same.