Fast Philosophy

Why do I read? Well, a big reason I forced myself back into the habit just over two years ago was because I felt that there were a lot of areas of knowledge out there that I had left untouched. And so over the past two weeks, I went from 0 to 100 in lightning speed on a subject that I had barely any concept of before: philosophy.

Fast Philosophy is a collaboration between  British-German writer Adam Fletcher and plain-German writer Lukas Egger, promising to cover the entirety of western philosophy in one hundred short, accessible mini-essays - with humour thrown in too. It seemed like as good a place as any to start.

I'll start by getting one thing out of the way - this book isn't particularly funny. I know humour is subjective and means different things to different people, but 99% of the jokes that are shoehorned into the chapters of Fast Philosophy are derivative, unoriginal or just plain predictable. This I found to be quite distracting at times, albeit not to the extent of getting in the way of the point of the book. And there were a handful of genuinely good one-liners lurking in there as well - "with great power comes big power bills" is one that has stuck in my mind.

But to disparage on this count is to ignore the actual purpose of the book; and as an accessible crash-course in the key themes of philosophy from its inception to the present day, it does a fantastic job. Starting, as one should, with the Greeks, moving through the Romans (with their extremes of stoicism and hedonism) and the soul-searching Germans to some of the problems and paradoxes currently occupying the world's thinkers. The likes of Confucius, Bertrand Russell and even David Foster Wallace get a look-in. Given that the fundamental questions of our existence - ethics, logic, God - are covered, as well as quite a bit that's not generally seen until degree level, the learning curve was steep, but everything was set out so neatly and concisely that I never struggled to keep up. All in all, a huge amount of information is conveyed in a very short space of time, but I quickly got into the flow of it, and my performance on the end-of-book quiz - 25 out of 30 - suggests that most of it stayed in too.

It is testament to the authors' skill that they are able to summarise so well and so clearly. Yes, it's limited, but I do now feel as though I have a solid basic knowledge of a topic on which I was previously very much under-informed.

4/5

And this goes even faster:

Crime and Punishment

Another year, another essential novel ticked off the list. It has become my aim to start each new year of my life with a book that I really should have read by now, no matter how long a read. 2019 kicked off 150 years in the past, with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a seminal work in that vast ocean of Russian literature so unexplored by me.

I was actually not unfamiliar with Dostoevsky's works going into it, having read a short story collection, you guessed it, somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18. Two stuck in my mind: White Nights and its heartbreaking depictions of loneliness, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, a nihilistic examination into human nature. Crime and Punishment is quite substantially longer and more developed, but manages to draw on similar themes.

Written after the author had returned from exile in Siberia, the novel follows the misfortunes of Rodion Raskolnikov (or is it Rodya? Every character has at least two names used interchangeably, which took some getting used to) as he grapples with the turmoil of his own mind. Initially suffering from delusions of grandeur, he convinces himself that murder for the purpose of stealing money could be the catalyst that gets him out of his impoverished student life and on the way to the fame and fortune that he deserves. But having committed the titular crime, the resulting guilt and anxiety send him into a nervous breakdown as he fears capture and debates whether to confess. With the room of a full novel to breathe, Dostoevsky's prose finds opportunity to wander and the result is an often excruciating, relentless cascade of inner monologues. Everyone, it seems, has something to hide or something to prove in the claustrophobic yet impersonal city of St. Petersburg.

If this all sounds a bit heavy, well, it was a lot of the time; after all, we're dealing with some serious subject matter. But it's kept afloat by the writing. Thanks to an adventurous translation (I couldn't help but smile at characters threatening to "brain" each other), it's still an easier read than most of what was written around that time - looking at you, Dickens - and Dostoevsky ramps up the sensationalism and plot twists throughout. The dialogue is just brilliant at times ("you trashy Prussian chicken leg in a crinoline" is my line of the year already), we're treated to probably the best account of the hangover-induced "fear" ever committed to paper, and the series of love triangles, blackmailing and subterfuge that make up the secondary plots are worthy of kitchen sink drama.

And if all this sounds fun, well, it was a lot of the time. But I couldn't help feeling that there was something about this book that held me back from fully enjoying or appreciating it. It dawned on me about two-thirds of the way through, in fact: this is a novel about a time in a place that I will never truly be able to identify with. It's Russia, in all its grim glory: arrogance and alcoholism, poverty and pretension, hunger and God, political engagement and the revolutionary spirit. Crime and punishment - punishment being the very real threat of hard labour in Siberia. Communism, communism, communism - although it was still 50 years or so from becoming a reality, the foundations are clear to see in the ideas of many of the characters. It's an existence that I, in my detached house in the comfortable Anglo-sphere, will never have to endure. And unfortunately, while I was able to appreciate Crime and Punishment as a great piece of writing, there was always that detachment.

I won't give up on the Russian classics just yet - there's a lot out there and Anna Karenina beckons - but Crime and Punishment didn't quite top the list.

4/5

WITH RUSSIA FROM LOVE