[davidwritesbugs]

Same. Then I tried to read Brothers karamazov, “ooof”, it literally took 200 pages before I stopped hating the ‘pointless’ book with its plot that went nowhere. Then I got it. Only certain authors can do this I reckon, but how you’d get a doom-scrolling teenager to do it? Goooood luck.

[Forgeties79]

I have tried to break into the brothers K two or three times and it’s just been so difficult for some reason. I know it’s kind of a joke at this point, but keeping track of all of the names is just so dizzying and distracting.

[FergusArgyll]

The edition I read had a map of characters at the beginning which was helpful

[hk__2]

I read War and Peace recently, is it the same amount of characters? At some point I almost started a genealogical tree of the characters.

[fleebee]

Regarding Brothers, I don't think it's that much more than the average novel of that length. What I think trips foreign readers up the most is the constant use of Russian diminutive names e.g. substituting Alyosha for Alexei or Mitenka for Dmitri.

[notpushkin]

I wonder if replacing those with more modern/“western” diminutives would help with that and whether it would hurt the writing style too much. It will definitely lack the vibe, but if you can’t read it otherwise, maybe it’s better than nothing?

E.g. Dima (widely used in modern Russian, and it’s clear that it’s short for Dmitry) instead of Mitenka or Alex instead of Alyosha (Lyosha is commonly used in Russian, but Alex would be easier to make a mental connection... until you have an Alexander and have to shorten that to Sasha; that one is probably a more widely known diminutive though)

[hk__2]

In the French translation of War and Peace I read, the first use of every diminutive had a footnote explaining who was that person.

[SoftTalker]

Any teenager IMO. I sometimes wonder how I got through high school English. Whether it was The Great Gatsby or Candide or King Lear or The Crucible or Moby Dick it was all so tedious and utterly, utterly boring. And this was well before the internet; home computers were just starting to become popular but almost nobody was online yet.

I did find Vonnegut and a small handful of others to be more engaging.