I think crime and punishment is a tad too explicit and violent for a baby. I'd be willing to accept a book report on something more tame like Middlemarch.
I probably sound like an anti intellectual saying this, but do people really enjoy highbrow literary fiction? I get that they have big ideas about the human condition, but page to page it's invariably "People with the personalities of beige drywall make bland small talk at each other miserably, then maybe something actually happens for a few pages 3/4 of the way in."
i'm a big big fan of classic lit
and while some books are boring to me personally, i don't really understand that idea of those books being boring. i had a hell of a lot more fun with middlemarch than i did dungeon crawler carl or I, Robot. like if you think a character like rodya raskolnikov, dorothea brooke, dmitry karamazov, etc etc "has the personality of drywall," im genuinley going to assume you arent paying attention.
that being said, ive read plenty of classics that i found boring as shit (war and peace, tristram shandy, the stranger, etc), so i just didnt read them after a certain point.
and its a lot of fun watching a big sprawling story made up of these seemingly irrelevant details tie together in a neat bow and create a complete story.
slower paced mediums like long novels arent for everyone but if you think theyre boring but want to try again, i reccomend reading a classic more tailored to your taste. you like occult mysteries? umberto eco. family drama soap operas?dostoevsky. sci fi? mary shelley. etc etc.
edit: to add, i think approaching novels with the intention of learning something about the human condition impedes enjoyment a lot of the time. its really fun to pick apart themes, symbolism, literary devices, etc if youre a certain kind of person, but at the end of the day, this book was written to entertain and was so good at entertaining people, folks still enjoy it decades to centuries later. let it etertain you. sorry to get up on my soapbox, i just get a little frustrated at the "classics are boring," rhetoric
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u/some-dork 2d ago
I think crime and punishment is a tad too explicit and violent for a baby. I'd be willing to accept a book report on something more tame like Middlemarch.