Poets & Writers opens with an amusing anecdote:
When Michael Dirda was in seventh grade, someone told him that Crime and Punishment was a mystery. He liked mysteries, had read the Hardy Boys, among others, so he went to the library in search of Dostoyevsky’s tome. He checked it out and read it — in three days. “I couldn’t put it down,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. “I just thought it was the best book I’d ever read in my whole life. I still think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.”