"If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever."
I believe I was sixteen when I read Crime and Punishment for the first [four] time[s]. I held the book in my hands, all too many pages of it, wholly unaware that it’d shape everything that came after.
I believe I was sixteen when I read Crime and Punishment for the first [four] time[s]. I held the book in my hands, all too many pages of it, wholly unaware that it'd shape everything that came after.
It's a book that scares and intimidates me now because maybe my whole life will be turned over again. Afraid it'll throw me into another existential crises, make me afraid of mirrors and the night again, and so I try, rather unsuccessfully, to avoid it. But I can't, never could: Raskolnikov's as much a part of me as any real world memory or friend or experience I've ever had.
It was the first book to make me really cry, and I wept into it, dropping the tears onto the page as I turned page after blurred page, unable to even look away until the book was finished, just two days after it was given to me. I stared at what I held in my hands and knew nothing would ever feel like this again, that the world outside this cover was changed irreparably, unequivocally. And so the only option was to turn back to page one and so I burned through it once more before the week was finished.
If words can save a life [they can], Dostoevsky's saved mine, even when I wasn't quite aware how much I needed him, needed someone to. It completely destroyed me, dismantled the entire world, the limits of existence, and it spent the next six months or six years reconstructing me, making me hopefully better than yesterday.
If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever. It may not be as magnificent or perfect as The Brothers Karamazov, but it matters to me more than I can even express. It's so much more than a book or a story: it's my whole life, before and after.
"I remember you."
This book, though, Ledfeather, it will save a life, it will change a life, and it will whisper to you across a century, through the forgotten dreams and lives, and the face of Doby Saxon will forever cling to the retinas, his face whited out by headlights, his hand reaching through the windshield, and you’ll fall apart with his story.
I picked up Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather again and opened to that page before it starts where all it says is, "I remember you," and I was hooked all over again, for the third time, never the last time, and the next thing I knew, the sun was rising and my heart was breaking, but in a good way, the way that resurrects you, that shows you everything you forgot to pay attention to, forgot to remember, and I closed it because it was done, again, finished for the third time, and I could’ve turned back to page one and began again, which is how the first two readings happened, in consecutive days, because this book burns you, burrows deep, and smolders, lives, reconnects cells, and balances chemistry.
If I had had this book when I was sixteen, I wonder if things would’ve been different. I wonder if this could’ve saved me the way Crime and Punishment brought me a sort of salvation, though it had to first consume and destroy me. This book, though, Ledfeather, it will save a life, it will change a life, and it will whisper to you across a century, through the forgotten dreams and lives, and the face of Doby Saxon will forever cling to the retinas, his face whited out by headlights, his hand reaching through the windshield, and you’ll fall apart with his story.