The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[Jamie]

I kept hoping this book would get better. The first 350pgs were tedious, but that's true of other books by this author. He does tend to take hundreds of pages to set up his characters and the backstory for the plot, and there is a murder in this novel. In fact, there is a murder and a murder investigation and a sensational trial. By page 400 there was finally a murder, and the bit about Dmitri being arrested for his father's murder when the reader was just reading from Dmitri's perspective how he had knocked out an old servant outside his father's house and then fled. That scene was good- just as the reader is thinking maybe Grigory was killed by that blow, not just knocked out, we find out that there's been another attack we were not 'present' for.
The Investigation segment is not bad, though there are enough secondary and tertiary story arcs going on that the investigation gets buried under more tediousness not directly related to the plot. Then the trial starts, and we get to read the defense and prosecution's closing speeches essentially in full, along with other speeches at this trial. If the reader was still awake when this section began, it's understandable that the reader might be yawning and counting pages till the end of the book from this point onward.
If you are reading this book for a class and focusing on Dostoyevsky's arguments about good and evil, there's a lot of quotable and paper-worthy material in this novel. If, on the other hand, you were hoping for 700-800pgs of pleasure reading... Well, this was at least not my favorite of Dostoyevsky's books, but maybe if you like slow, tangent-filled classic literature you might like this book. I gave this one 3 stars on Goodreads.