
I guess it's because the book spends so much time on Raskonikov's mental state but the reader, he gives you so many distinctive voices, does female characters very good and perfected the imagery people develop about these characters concerning how they would sound. Yet, it took me 4 tries to stay with the book. But it is wrong to compare a genre novel to a literary monster such as Crime and Punishment, a book that is so real and so scary in some moments (I became a bit paranoid when Raskolnikov murdered the pawnbroker, feeling the axe in my chest, looking around my room for him, checking my doors) that to study it is to study the psychology of most murderers. The longest book I have ever read in the shortest time was a 400 page book by W.C.
