Dear Friends and Readers: 

2026 is less than a week away. It's thrilling to look back at all of the projects and progress I've made as well as the new year to come. I hope that 2025 was as creative and satisfying for you as it was for me. 

Per tradition, I've rounded up my top ten books from the past year that I whole-heartedly enjoyed. This year as you'll see below, the theme was classic literature. I couldn't stop reading great writers and great stories from the western canon. Some titles had been on my to-read list for decades. Some were re-reads. A few were spontaneous pick-ups.

​And it was one of the most rewarding years of reading I've ever had. Whether you pick up one or ten of them, fiction or non-fiction, now or in the future, I hope that they give you as much as they have given me.
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, 
Jon 

P.S. Here are my yearly book roundups from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015. 
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Paperback | 488 pages

Goethe’s Faust is a sweeping two-act drama that begins in intimacy and moral tension, then expands into a kaleidoscope of history, politics and myth. A the outset, we meet Dr. Faust, who is entirely dissatisfied with his scholarly life thus far. So, when chance has it, he actually strikes a pact with the Devil himself, to regain his youth and vitality in order to experience life to the fullest.

Faust longs to be and feel and live in totality; to have the greatest successes and even the most tragic falls—not in books or theory or study—but rather to "drink from living streams." The catch? If and only if Faust finds such a moment so perfect that he wishes it to last forever, does the Devil get to claim Faust's soul. 
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Act I (1808) is a tightly woven moral tragedy with Faust driving. Act II (1832) is more of a sweeping, episodic ride. Together, the two acts capture the nearly unquenchable ambitions of a man who wanted to drink deeply of life. And Goethe's treatment of the Faustian bargain is unqiue with the author's answer and conclusion. 

You can read my full recommendation for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust here. 
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Paperback | 150 pages
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My love for anthropomorphic fiction began with Brian Jacques Redwall series in 5th grade, and continued with David Clement-Davies' Fire Bringer in 7th grade, and its inspiration, Richard Adam's Watership Down, in 8th grade. Skipping a few decades, I finally turned for the first time to Jack London’s classic anthropomorphic novels, White Fang and The Call of the Wild. 

White Fang is set in Canada's wintry wilderness at the turn of the 20th century, a wolf pup is born into a cold, harsh, world. Through both instinct and experience, our protagonist struggles to discovers the hierarchy of plants and animals and Man by transforming himself into a mature, alpha predator and protector, fulfilling his wolf nature. He codifies these life-saving laws into his wolf-mind: 
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• The Law of Meat — There are meat-eaters, and those who are eaten. 
• The Law of the Wild – Strength rules; weakness invites attack.
• The Law of Instinct – Behavior guided by innate impulses.
• The Law of the Club – Pain establishes hierarchy.
• The Law of the Sled – Discipline allows coordinated survival.
• The Law of Authority – Humans are supreme. 
• The Law of Property – Boundaries under humans.
• The Law of Love – Affection as a civilizing force.

You can read my full recommendation for Jack London's White Fang here. 
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Clothbound Classics | 170 pages
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I love essays. Writing them. Reading them. 'Essay' comes from the French 'essayer,' meaning 'to try' or 'to attempt.' One of my favorite essayists is George Orwell. This collection of six essays form a constellation of themes that are just as relevant nearly 100 years later: power coerces; institutions harden us humans; and language decays under dishonesty. Yet clarity, sympathy, nature, and plain speech remain available for us to reclaim our dignity. I love his terse, unvarnished honesty. 

In Shooting an Elephant (1936), Orwell reflects on his time as a police officer in British-ruled Lower Burma, and the corrupting of his soul in the imperialist system. In The Spike, Orwell recounts a military exercise in which he and other soldiers are sent to survive briefly as tramps. Such, Such Were the Joys turns to Orwell’s rough childhood at St. Cyprian’s boarding school. In Why I Write, Orwell outlines four motives behind writing: egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, political purpose, and historical impulse. He argues that political awareness does not corrupt art, but clarifies it. This concern deepens in Politics and the English Language, where Orwell diagnoses modern prose as evasive and insincere. He critiques dying metaphors, pretentious diction, vague abstractions, and euphemisms that conceal responsibility. 

Against systems of domination and distortion, Orwell repeatedly turns to ordinary, daily pleasures. In Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, he celebrates seasonal changes and small encounters with nature as experiences that are untouched by propaganda, bureaucracy, and economic class. Similarly, In Defense of English Cooking praises everyday foods—bread, puddings, apples, sausages—found not in restaurants, but in real English homes. 

You can read my full recommendation for six of Orwell's autobiographical essays here. 
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Paperback | 1,079 pages
Audible | ​≈ 62 hours
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This modern American classic rallies back and forth through junior tennis matches, turns inward to vulnerable addiction therapy sessions, and expands outwards across a midwest-vastness worth of mass media culture. The novel is encyclopedic and mythic, hilarious and grotesque, and, at times disorienting with its nearly 400 endnotes. And yet, it's not insurmountable. 

Set in 2009 (written in 1996), the U.S., Canada, and Mexico have since merged into O.N.A.N.—The Organization of North American Nations. The acronym is not subtle: “onanism” means self-pleasuring, and the book is quite literally about a society that has made mass-consumption and endless pleasure its highest god. The new president, Johnny Gentle, is a germaphobic, former crooner who solves America’s increasing waste problem by “gifting” Canada a massive toxic dump called 'The Great Concavity' (modern Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire).

In addition, time itself has been corporatized. Instead of the Gregorian calendar, companies sponsor entire years (The Year of the Whopper, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, The Year of Glad, etc.).​ At the center of the novel is an art-house film called Infinite Jest--a film so beautiful, pleasurable, and addictive that anyone who watches it loses all desire for anything else, eventually dying of dehydration or starvation. 

For all of the novel's cultural satire and political absurdity, Infinite Jest essentially is a story of broken humans longing for real connection—with themselves and others. The novel's lengthy and numerous recovery sessions, coached practices, and private moments of sobriety reveal the heart of the novel whose characters are defeated by some form of addicitve consumption: ideology, drugs, media—and therefore are starving for meaning. 

This novel is one of the longest and most earnest stories I've had the pleasure of finishing. 

​You can read my full recommendation for David Foster Wallace's magnum opus here. 
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Paperback | 180 pages
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Hardcover | 265 pages
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First published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe blends spiritual reflection, survival narrative, and exotic adventure into what is often regarded as the first English-language novel. Despite some pacing and thematic problems in the second half, Crusoe remains a compelling journey of mind and body. 

The first half of Robinson Crusoe surprised me with its powerful, personal, philosophical meditations.  As I read the yearning of young Crusoe for an adventure at sea and experienced his heartbreaking captivity by Barbary pirates, his ingenious emancipation, and tragic shipwreck onto the island, I greatly appreciated most Crusoe's internal dilemmas. He wrestles with God, cursing his physical and spiritual isolation. And after many years of toil on-island and of honest self-reflection, he celebrates his victories over the sea, starvation, bouts of bad health, and cannibals. This transformation from victimhood to a kind of stoic gratitude, is enthralling. 

You can read my full recommendation for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe here. 
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Hardcover | 288 pages
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"Once upon a time the great mass of English people were unfree. They could not live where they chose, nor work for whom they pleased. Society in those feudal days was mainly divided into lords and peasants. The lords held the land from the king, and the peasants or villeins were looked upon as part of the soil, and had to cultivate it to support themselves and their masters.” 

It's been at least twenty years since I last wandered the "leafy paths" of Sherwood Forest with Robin of Locksley. Henry Gilbert's classic, century-old retelling of Robin Hood is fresh, episodic, and inspirational. I also loved this Paul Creswick rendition as a boy, which is beautifully illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. 

13th century England was an age of impenetrable castles and far-away crusades, widespread serfdom and untamed forests, barons and nobles, lords and ladies, monks and abbeys, and, of course, death and taxes. The green woods becomes more than a hiding place for Robin and his small group of outlaw companions. There, he establishes an alternative moral order. The forest shelters those wronged by knights, abbots, and the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire. And his lifelong grail quest is one of restorative justice across the land—here and now, on earth, in England, for every innocent and abused man, woman, and child. 

You can read my full review of Henry Gilbert's Robin Hood here. 
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Paperback | 550 pages
Audible | ​≈ 23 hours
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The Three Musketeers' pace, characters, and sheer sense of panache made it an unforgettable summer read. Best paired with a glass—or three—of Red Anjou (Cabernet Franc), the favorite drink of the novel's four heroes. The coming-of-age tale of a fiery Gascon youth, d'Artagnan, is swashbuckling to-the-hilt. We feast on chivalrous duels, deadly seductions, tragic betrayals, and undying friendship. Set against the political currents of seventeenth-century France, we also traverse far and wide into Parisian ballrooms, the siege works of La Rochelle, and English castles. Every character’s fate feels both earned and inevitable. And what characters there are! 

Dumas' descriptions of d’Artagnan, Athos, and Aramis are vivid. Porthos is left more to the reader’s imagination, though I'm told that the later novels he is fleshed out as Herculean strength incarnate. Captain Tréville is drawn as a 'Jupiter' among men, thundering over his Musketeers with paternal pride. Even minor figures—valets like Planchet, Grimaud, and Mousqueton—are sketched with humor and individuality. And Lady de Winter, the novel's villain, is a twisted, witchy, seductress that greatly disturbs the characters with her proudly dishonorable plotting. Dumas' style leaps off the page. It has a cinematic quality to it. 

In fact, Disney's 1993 film adaptation was a childhood favorite, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Athos, Oliver Platt as Porthos, Charlie Sheen as Aramis, and Chris O'Donnell as d'Artagnan. My favorite though was Cardinal Richelieu played by Tim Curry. 

You can read my full recommendation for Alexander Dumas' The Three Musketeers here. 
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Paperback | 210 pages
Audible | ​≈ 7 hours
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Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) is the greatest children's story I have ever read. In a bleak midwinter in Yorkshire, cousins Mary Lennox and Colin Craven along with their friend Dickon uncover a neglected garden on the grounds of Misselthwaite Manor.

For all the protagonists' weeding, planting, nurturing, and playing in their secret garden, the greatest growth is actually within the characters' own souls. And the final chapter delivers one of the most satisfying crescendos in literature that I have ever encountered—the revelation, reunion, the restoration of the broken family—by means of nature. For it's evergreen gentle and healthy examples of growth and beauty inspire Mary, Colin, and even Master Craven to choose to change their minds, their actions, and themselves. 

The 1993 film adaptation is exceptional too. It deepens the internal conflicts of Mary Lennox more than the novel, especially in the film's climax.

You can read my full recommendation for Burnett's The Secret Garden here. 
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Paperback | 720 pages
Audible | ​≈ 25 hours
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This is the shortest novel of 19th century English author, Mary Ann Evans (pen name 'George Eliot'), and one of my favorites. Perhaps best known for her sweeping, pastoral, social novel Middlemarch (1872), Evans' Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861) is a powerful portrait of an innocent man's life-long quest for social and moral redemption. It seems to rhyme in tone and themes with Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). And Evans' narration brilliantly introspects inside characters with the same force as Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. 

Set in early 19th century England, the story follows a textile weaver named Silas Marner who resides in Lantern Yard. It's a small, rural village and a superstitious one at that; the church deacons sermonize to dutiful attendants like Silas each Sunday. There one's social reputation is of the utmost importance to foster and keep clean. And Silas does just that, industrious, honest, charitable, and engaged to an upward oriented young woman. Oddly, Silas begins to suffer from epileptic seizures. Some villagers misinterpret this malady as a sign of guilt or divine judgment and grow weary of him.

Worse yet, one night Silas is falsely accused of theft after a deacon’s wallet disappears and is somehow recovered from the young man's home. The honest weaver protests, but the deacon excommunicates him from the church nonetheless, and Silas, losing his reputation and fiancé, then loses his temper, publicly cursing Lantern Yard and even God himself, before leaving home forever. 
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Evans began writing fiction in her late thirties, adopting the pen name 'George Eliot' in part to ensure her work would be taken seriously. Her works are rich, lyrical, and packed with subtle observations: careful psychological insights, attention to personal and social cause and effect, and an interest in how individuals are shaped by their community. 

Evans described her novels as “a series of experiments in life.” Silas Marner seems to be an experiment to see if readers find it plausible for an uprooted individual to find roots in a new society; and if so, how that re-rooting is made possible. Rather than directly moralizing or preaching, Evans sought to examine how our choices unfold over time, how sympathy can be cultivated or stunted, and how people live with the consequences of their actions. Though she ultimately rejected supernatural religion at the age of twenty-two, Evan's work retains a strong Christian ethos: grounded in responsibility, compassion, and the slow, often painful (re)weaving of human lives together. 

Two (among many) examples of Evans' rich psychological insights in Silas Marner include:

1. False memories: Evans narrates and shows how false memories ultimately lead Raveloe's earnest villagers away from unmasking the true gold-filcher, Dunston. One man had seen a suspicious looking man with gold earrings, when in fact it had been too dark outside to see them. Moreover, we the readers and Evans' the narrator, knows that Dunston doesn't even ear gold earrings. Yet, the villagers quickly deduce a possible culprit as an unknown passer-by. 
   
   
2. Social duties: Evans narrates the mental acrobats involved between hosts and guests wonderfully: “...and the charter of Raveloe seemed to be renewed by the [dance] ceremony. It was not thought of as unbecoming levity for the old and middle-aged people to dance a little before sitting down to cards, but rather as part of their social duties. For what were these if not to be merry at appropriate times, interchanging visits and poultry with due frequency, paying each other old-established compliments in sound traditional phrases, passing well-tried personal jokes, urging your guests to eat and drink too much out of hospitality, and eating and drinking too much in your neighbor’s house to show that you liked your cheer?” 

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Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880) is one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian period that I've encountered. She was born in Warwickshire, England, in a rural setting that would later inform the village life, moral psychology, and social textures of her fiction. Educated in Nuneaton and Coventry, Evans was initially deeply evangelical, marked by habits of intense self-examination, moral seriousness, and religious devotion.

In her early twenties, Evans underwent a profound intellectual transformation. By age twenty-two, she no longer believed in the supernatural foundations of Christianity, though she continued attending church for a time at her father’s request, with the understanding that she would occupy her mind with other ideas. This shift did not diminish her moral concern; instead, it redirected it. Her lifelong interest became the ethical consequences of belief, sympathy, and social responsibility.

Evans was also an accomplished scholar and translator. At age 27, she translated and published David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846), a landmark work of historical criticism. In 1854, she translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, a text arguing that religious belief reflects human needs and ideals. These projects placed her at the center of Victorian intellectual life and deeply influenced her later fiction, which often explores morality without reliance on orthodox theology.

That same year, Evans formed a lifelong partnership with George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), a writer and thinker interested in the history of philosophy and biology. Though they lived together openly and regarded themselves as married “in the sight of Heaven,” they could not legally wed due to Lewes’s prior marriage and the divorce laws of the time. This unconventional union seems to have cost Evans social acceptance, but provided her with intellectual companionship and emotional stability.

Is it simply Silas Marner, the protagonist who forsakes his righteous contempt for the world to save a young girl?

Is it little Eppie, who rescues her adoptive father from despair, impatience and uncaring feelings?

Could it actually be Dunston Cass, who gambled and ultimately stole Silas' life savings, enabling the the old man to hit rock bottom again. 

Or is it Godfrey Cass, who enabled his brother to gamble in the first place and then lie to cover up a string of transgressions.

Maybe it's the Christian God who sits above all of Raveloe and all of the universe.

Or is it Mary Ann Evans herself, the novelist who writes from a higher vantage point than 'George Eliot' and—within the text—even God. 

Perhaps Evans is saying that it is all of us who weave the great tapestry together—one more complex, meaningful, and beautiful for it. [JG]
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— Mary Ann Evans, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe
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— Why I Write, George Orwell
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I love essays. Writing them. Reading them. “Essay” comes from the French essayer, meaning “to try” or “to attempt.”​ Some of my favorite essayists include:

THE ANCIENTS
- Marcus Tullius Cicero's On Duties, and On Old Age
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca's Letters from a Stoic
- Gaius Musonius Rufus' That Man is Born with an Inclination Toward Virtue, That Women Too Should Study Philosophy, That Exile is not an Evil, What means of Livelihood is Appropriate for a Philosopher?, What is the Chief End of Marriage, Is Marriage a Handicap for the Pursuit of Philosophy? Must One Obey One's Parents under all Circumstances?, and On Furnishings. 

THE RENAISSANCE
- Michel de Montaigne: The complete works, especially On the Power of Imagination
- Francis Bacon: The complete collection, especially Of Youth and Age. 

THE MODERNS
- Ayn Rand: Philosophy: Who Needs It, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, The Virtue of Selfishness, and The Return of the Primitive. 
- Michael Crichton: Travels and Aliens Cause Global Warming
- George Orwell: Nearly everything. 

CONTEMPORARY
- Evan Pushak of the 'Nerdwriter' YouTube channel, especially Westworld: What Makes Anthony Hopkins Great
- Megha Lillywhite's Substack in it's entirety. 
- Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and all of these. 

George Orwell’s short nonfiction—largely autobiographical—forms a coherent investigation into power: how it is exercised, internalized, justified, and resisted. Across essays written in the 1930s and 1940s, Orwell returns to the same pressure points: imperial authority, institutional cruelty, linguistic decay, childhood fear, and the quiet moral relief offered by nature.

​Taken together, this collection of six essays form a constellation of themes that are just as relevant nearly 100 years later: power coerces; institutions harden us humans; and language decays under dishonesty. Yet clarity, sympathy, nature, and plain speech remain available for us to reclaim our dignity. Orwell does not present solutions so much as habits: attention, precision, and moral refusal. His nonfiction endures due to its terse, unvarnished honesty.  
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— Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell

— Such, Such Were the Joys, George Orwell
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— Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
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— Such, Such Were the Joys, George Orwell
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Against systems of domination and distortion, Orwell repeatedly turns to ordinary, daily pleasures. In Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, he celebrates seasonal change and small encounters with nature as experiences untouched by propaganda or bureaucracy. “Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring,” he writes. Nature is a place of beauty, solace, and help's give life meaning. 

Similarly, In Defense of English Cooking praises everyday foods—bread, puddings, apples, sausages—found not in restaurants, but in homes. These essays suggest that while institutions corrupt, ordinary life retains pockets of sanity, continuity, and quiet joy. Restaurants in England at the time catered to foreign cuisines, but the soul of English cooking was quietly baked, sautéed, and served in real kitchens by real English folk. [JG]
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— Such, Such Were the Joys, George Orwell
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​‘Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary, 
How does your garden grow? 
With silver bells and cockle shells, 
And marigolds all in a row.’

— Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, 1744

Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) is the greatest children's story I have ever read. 

In a bleak midwinter in Yorkshire, cousins Mary Lennox and Colin Craven along with their friend Dickon uncover a neglected garden on the grounds of Misselthwaite Manor.

Mary, 'quite contrary,' has just arrived from India after losing her parents in a terrible fire. She laments her fate, missing the warm weather and the company of her Ayah, her nursemaid. 

Mary's cousin, Colin, is a frail, bed-bound boy and has spent most of his life confined in his bedroom.  Although spoiled daily with attention from the house staff, he is as much a victim of his weak back as he is of his widowed and absent father. All the while Misselthwaite's head housekeeper Mrs. Medlock's enables his sour tantrums. 

Dickon is a handsome farm boy who lives on the moors. Hardworking and honest, he has an almost magical ability to connect with plants and animals. He helps both Mary and Colin to reconnect with the earth and themselves. 
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For all the protagonists' weeding, planting, nurturing, and playing in their secret garden, the greatest growth shown throughout the novel is within the children's souls—and later the adults'. 

​Mary comes to England like a seed buried in frost, unable to plant herself in happiness. She is starving for both physical and emotional sustenance, and had been before her parents' tragic death. Only when she finally goes out onto the moors does her healing begin: "...the big breaths of rough fresh air blown over the heather filled her lungs with something which was good for her whole thin body and whipped some red color into her cheeks and brightened her dull eyes when she did not know anything about it.” Contrasted so beautifully is the constrictive and almost gothic energy of Misselthwaite Manor, which, indeed still houses a tragic past: Colin Craven. 

Colin, Master Craven's only son, is languishing, physically and emotionally. But his first conversation with Mary reveals his unspoiled curiosity for life: “‘Is the spring coming?’ he said. ‘What is it like? You don’t see it in rooms if you are ill.’” Mary then paints him a picture of the world he has been denied: “‘It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth.’” To which Colin “...had become quite excited and his strange eyes began to shine like stars…” And when Colin falls back on dark thoughts, Mary refuses to let him spiral: “‘Don’t let us talk about dying; I don’t like it. Let us talk about living.’” 

The protagonists' healing explodes after the discovery of a brass key that fits the locked gate of a long-ago neglected garden waiting to be tended: “[Mary] unchained and unbolted and unlocked… she sprang across the step… the sun pouring down on her… warm, sweet wafts… and the fluting and twittering and singing coming from every bush and tree.”
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Meanwhile, Master Archibald Craven has been traveling abroad, grieving for his dead wife, Colin's mother. Dark thoughts have consumed him, and he's let them grow and stay there. Burnett describes him as "courageous" as he "refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through [his soul]." And yet, ever so slowly, across Norway's fjords, and then more actively in the Swiss Alps by a stream, Craven's "mind and body grew quiet." He savors the change. “He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind—filling and filling it until other things were softly pushed aside. It was as if a sweet clear spring had begun to rise in a stagnant pool and had risen and risen until at last it swept the dark water away.”

And the feeling remains: “The singular calmness remained with him the rest of the evening, and he slept a new, reposeful sleep; but it was not with him very long. He did not know that it could be kept. By the next night he had opened the doors wide to his dark thoughts, and they had come trooping and rushing back. He left the valley and went on his wandering way again. But, strange as it seemed to hum, there were minutes sometimes half-hours—when, without his knowing why, the black burden seemed to lift itself again and he knew he was a living man and not a dead one.” 

Now newly restored, Master Craven sets off for home. 
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Director Agnieszka Holland's 1993 adaptation is a treasure. I think it deepens the internal conflicts of Mary Lennox more than the novel, especially in the film's climax. Holland also expands on the conflict between the children and the adults (Mrs. Medlock and some of the older servants). Lastly, I think the film turns up the volume of the gothic tone in Misselthwaite, with cold stone interiors, secret passages, scary hunting dogs, ghostly sounds, and haunted objects of Mrs. Craven. 

The acting is fantastic, especially from the three children: Kate Maberly plays Mary Lennox, Heydon Prowse plays Colin Craven, Andrew Knott plays Dickon, John Lynch plays Lord Archibald Craven, and the late, great Maggie Smith plays Mrs. Medlock. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment didn't speak to me in high school. I think it was partly because of the rather terse, stiff translation that I had initially picked up. However, I am so glad that I finally gave the Russian classic another try (nearly twenty years later)! Reading the David McDuff translation made Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikoff's dark journey through mid-19th century St. Petersburg and into the depths of his own soul a truly unforgettable experience. 

Our disaffected Russian student's sweating, trembling, hallucinatory state before and after his horrible crime is some of the greatest characterization and psychological writing that I have ever encountered in literature: the endless pacing in his claustrophobic, attic room as he broods and argues with himself, his elitist taunting of the police officers and wealthy patrons of the Crystal Palace, his confession to Sonya of his disgust for conventional 'louse' morality and his proto-Nietzschean views that the few extraordinary men stand above the louses' superstitious morality—all this is masterfully painted.

​As is Dostoyevsky's portrait of St. Petersburg: the city's central sewer-like canal which witnesses murder, prostitution, and corruption; the labyrinth of backstreets that trap the crowds like a pressure chamber of heat and noise and distrust; coffin-like apartments with walls too thin to keep secrets; the rich and detached Crystal Palace with its glassy, vaulted veneers high class; the spiritual decay creeping over a modernizing and increasingly envious society.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
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— Porfiry to Raskolnikoff, Crime and Punishment
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And then, most importantly, there is Sonya. She is the eldest daughter of the drunken civil servant Marmeladov, whom Raskolnikoff meets and assists early on in the novel. Sonya and her family are perpetually poor, due to the father's alcoholism. Dostoyevsky paints her circumstances as utterly bleak, and yet her soul shines on brighter and further than anyone. 

In order to feed her starving siblings and stepmother, Sonya ultimately “takes the yellow ticket,” (i.e., becomes registered as a prostitute), thus sacrificing herself totally. Amidst societal scorn and even a  blackmail attempt, she holds steadfast to her family's security. Moreover, she shows true compassion for Raskolnikoff more than any other character—even after his dark confession. Sonya embodies the Christian counterpoint to Raskolnikoff’s and Svidgailov's nihilistic theory. She is the only hope of redemption for both characters. 
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Despite its 19th-century setting, the book wrestles with ideas that are everywhere and in every generation, namely two: the temptation to justify violence with high-minded ideology and how to achieve not just legal, but moral redemption for one's evil actions. 

The energy of the story is more about the fallout after the murder(s) than the murder(s) themselves. The psychological corruption and philosophical justifications leading up to the heinous deed, the self-deception involved in those justifications, the impact of the deed on society at large, and the potential redemption of the criminal both communally and individually. 

Apparently, many readers and critics of the time took Dostoyevsky's novel to be an attack on Russia's young generation. But famously, Dostoyevsky wrote to the literary critic Strakev that, “You alone have understood me,” when Strakev claimed that Crime and Punishment is “not a mockery of the younger generation, neither a reproach nor an accusation—it is a lament over it.” Dostoyevsky feared the rising trends of what he saw as a kind of nihilistic materialism in young people, yes, but also the culture at large. No doubt, the older pawnbroker and landlords of this novel are not exactly heroic or even good characters. Dostoyevsky's antidote, at least in part, seems to be the human will—to hold fast to the Christian faith and values that give life meaning. One of the greatest values is sympathy and love for others. 

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Epilogue, Chapter 1
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— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Epilogue, Chapter 2
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While in Siberian exile, Dostoyevsky was deeply affected by Victor Hugo's romantic novels, specifically The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) and Les Miserables (1862). In fact, I've been told that there is a terrific non-fiction work exploring just how Dostoyevsky was inspired by Hugo. I plan to investigate immediately.

The Romantic school of literature emphasizes 'what might be and ought to be,' or, in Dostoyevsky's case 'what ought not be'. This is contrasted with the naturalist school(s) of literature which depict 'what is'. Both Dostoyevsky's and Hugo's romantic works stagger the imagination with their moral weight, psychological nuance, and the power that humans have to choose their own destiny. Their characters hold individual values that are knowable to themselves and others. The characters can be mistaken or correct. They can come to understand the universe and their place in it. They hold the ability to beautify or uglify the world with their choices. Sonya and Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment and Javert and Valjean in Les Miserables are masterful, romantic characters.

There is something incredibly, refreshingly human about both writer's respective novels, though one is certainly darker than the other. These are also the two greatest novels that I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. If you love one, please try the other. If you haven't yet read either, seriously consider it! [JG]
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