The only ten in my notebook.

Four months. January to April, which breaks my own rule of one a month, and I'm not sorry.

I read Augusto Vidal's Spanish, the Alianza with the tiny print, and kept the Pevear and Volokhonsky open beside it for the places where I wanted to check. This is a ridiculous way to read a novel and I recommend it to nobody. But Vidal is warm and P and V are exact and between them I felt I was getting most of what was actually there.

Everyone talks about the Grand Inquisitor. Fair enough. The chapter which took the top of my head off is the one just before it, Rebellion, where Ivan puts the suffering of children on the table and returns his ticket. I've read arguments against God since I was a student and not one of them is as hard to answer as a polite man saying he doesn't want a heaven which costs that.

And then — and this I hadn't expected at all — the book doesn't answer him. Alyosha doesn't answer him. Zosima doesn't answer him. What happens instead is a kiss, and then the novel simply goes on showing you people until you notice you haven't been handed an argument, you've been handed a family.

Zosima's section is the part people skip. My friend Nuria skipped it and then told me the book was sentimental, and I said, Nuria, that's the least sentimental part in it. An old man dies and then he smells, and everyone is scandalised because the saint turned out to be corruptible like anybody else. Dostoevsky is making that joke at the expense of his own believers. It's a hard joke and he doesn't soften it.

Complaint: the trial goes on far too long. The lawyers speak for whole chapters and I started skipping paragraphs, and I'd say so to Fyodor Mikhailovich himself if the chance arrived. He was being paid by the sheet, so I forgive him, and I skipped anyway.

Grushenka isn't at all what I was promised. Katerina is worse than anybody warns you. And Smerdyakov frightens me more than any murderer in any thriller, because of the guitar, and the hair oil, and the way he's always standing slightly to one side of the room.

Ten out of ten! There was one other ten in my notebook, from 2016, and I've since crossed it out. This one stays.

If you're going to attempt it, give yourself the winter. Read the family chapters fast and the arguing chapters slowly. Don't read the introduction first, because every introduction to this book tells you what it means and it's much better to work it out yourself and be wrong for a while. And don't worry about the names. You'll muddle one Fyodor with the other and nothing bad will happen.