Literary Pick (**)

The Brothers Karamazov

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

There's a quote by Lauren Bacall in a movie called "The Mirror Has Two Faces" which I absolutely love, and it goes like this: "I've buried a husband, I've raised two daughters, I've *made* my coffee." That's pretty much how I feel about Russian Literature after finishing The Brothers Karamazov. I've read War and Peace, I've read Crime and Punishment, I've read Anna Karenina, and I've read The Idiot,.... I've *made* my coffee. Meaning, I'm done, it's over, no more. I'm sorry, but enough is enough.
The Brothers Karamazov is just another novel that served as an excuse for a Russian writer to drown you in their philosophical ideas about politics and religion. It's taken me thousands of pages to finally arrive to this realization. However, knowing me, I'll likely end up reading Notes from the Underground, anyway.
The story about father and son vying for the same woman was a theme I didn't expect from Dostoyevsky, to be honest.. To me there is no comparison between this novel and Crime and Punishment. You cannot even compare it to The Idiot. I will concede that the only merit in this work is how it differed from his other tome's, because typically, writers adhere to one type of theme and don't part far from it.
I'm still not certain what was the purpose of including (insert something I have forgotten in the course of reading and trying to finish this book which took me 2 1/2 months) in the novel, other than to add an additional 300+ pages to the story. Most of which I suppose served as an extenuation for lengthy discourses on religion. Once I was able to wade through 500 pages of development, and to the trial part of the story I had to literally drag my sight from word to painstaking word. This book gets 2 stars by automatic default because it's Dostoyevsky.