I've been reading Dostoyevsky for the first time in decades, and apparently my adolescent preconceptions still hold true: when it comes to the Russians, I fall into the Tolstoy camp, not the Dostoyevsky one. Still, I'm not sorry to be reading Notes from Underground. The central character's obsessive self-loathing is, in its revolting individualism, a check on my own self-preoccupations; and the frenzy of the writing is rather like listening to Paganini--lots of crazy runs and trills and hard-to-manage technical showmanship but also a certain emotional and aural clutter. In the end, though, all I can conclude is that sometimes the modern era makes me sad. Why am I able to imagine writing Notes from Underground but not able to imagine writing Beowulf? I'd much rather write Beowulf.

I realize this is a dopy, unexamined reaction to Dostoyevsky. Most serious readers seem to love his books, but I just can't. Maybe I will get a cranky comment, like I did when I wrote here about not adoring Roberto Bolano's books. So be it. Internet litterateurs have the bad habit of believing that everyone should like what they like because it is the best. So I want to remind you to feel very, very free not to like what I like or agree with what I say. Very possibly next year I won't agree with it either, for what's wrong with ebbing and flowing among one's books? Why should I like the poetry of Wallace Stevens this morning? Or why shouldn't I?