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I was always told re C&P in school: "The crime was to assign it, the punishment was to read it".

Karamazov was much harder for me to read than C&P or The Idiot, and I liked the other two best.

That said, it's well worth it to read the famous passages, they are incredible prose

Super interesting to read everyone's opinions about C&P. I too was force-fed lots of classics in school, and practically always resorted to CliffsNotes. For whatever reason, C&P struck such a chord with me, I "couldn't put it down", won a scholarship writing about it, and got to skip a bunch of Lit classes in college :)

There were many classic novels forced via English class that I actively disliked. Most of Melville gives me an eye twitch to this day. But C&P clicked with me and my friend group. We all loved the weeks we spent on it, discussing in class, and it remains a book I re-read every few years.

This is heresy, but if you skip the chapters in Moby Dick of asides, it's a pretty gripping story. There's a reason why Star Trek keeps stealing Ahab's best lines. I like some of the chapters of asides, but they're really not what makes the book a classic.

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