Lee Hunts

I just finished reading Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. For reference, I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is apparently the most accurate translation. It replicates the rough syntactic structure of the original Russian text that other translations often try to smooth over for the sake of readability, and they also apparently selected vocabulary and turns of phrases that existed in English predating the original release of the book in Russian in 1866. The result is a fairly dense and very raw read, but one that is also very engaging, if you are willing to give it a chance. You have to push through paragraphs that last four pages, perhaps even longer, and infamously long rants from characters—but I actually got used to it rather quickly, and by the end, it was like reading anything else. This novel, rather famously, involves a man (Raskolnikov) who believes he is justified in killing a corrupt pawnbroker with an axe, on the judgement that she is an active dr...

I just finished reading Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. This is a reread of the book, given I read it some time ago when I was a teenager. I generally did not read any of the required books at school, so I am not sure if this is one of the few that I did end up reading, or if I read it later in my free time. Either way, I knew what I was getting myself into from the outset, and I can say that I got the reference from the fourth season of The Walking Dead, when that came out. If you didn't get it, just go outside and look to the flowers. This book is written about two men in the Great Depression. They are consigned by circumstances to walk the landscape for any odd job they can find, just so they can make ends meet. But behind all that is a dream. The American Dream: where the two of them can be wholly self-sufficient, livin' offa the fatta the lan'. They will have their own tract of land, their own food production, and won't have to answer to any one. This ideal emb...