Hi! I'm a 9th grader and I just got to page 215 on Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky in under 3 weeks, but it's been an exhausting read due to its thematic and conceptual density, so much to the point that I've decided to temporarily drop it (and restart it) and check it later again with a fresh mind. I'm not precisely a beginner to this category, as I've read numerous other books of equal caliber and understood them completely, but Crime and Punishment was a completely different beast. As such, I've been wondering about different books which still provide that sense of intellectual discovery and challenge, while still being appropriate for a younger person like me.
If you have any good recommendations, please do comment!
by VeryDemureVeryMature
4 Comments
Replay by Ken Grimwood
What other books have you read in this type? That would be helpful for us to steer you. If you haven’t read it already, I think you might get something out of East of Eden. Thematically dense, but very readable. As a bonus, it will most certainly be one you could revisit as an adult and get even more out of it.
All of these are rather short but very impactful and great reads/philosophical
Camus The Stranger
Kafkas Metamorphosis and other short stories
Voltaires Candide
Hesse Siddartha
Fydors Notes from the underground
Tolstoy Death of Ivan Ilych
Chekovs Ward #6
Koestlers Darkness at noon
Conrads Heart of Darkness
Stoner by John Williams
Mccarthy The Road
“Equal caliber” doesn’t give us a lot to work with. The Russian school of literature lends itself to a specific type of writing that can definitely be opaque and exhausting. What else have you tried that you think worked better?
Thinking back to high school, I did read C&P, but we also read things like Macbeth, heart of darkness, brave new world, etc. All of these works are incredibly rich and deserve more analysis than I gave them when I read them for the first time.
Maybe if you have a few notes on what you liked, we could give better recommendations.