The Brothers Karamazov

A vicious old man is murdered, one of his three sons is charged, and Dostoevsky uses the case to argue about faith, doubt, free will, and whether a just God could allow children to suffer. The brothers are the argument made flesh: Dmitri all appetite and honor, Ivan all cold intellect, Alyosha all belief. The novel stops the plot cold for whole chapters, the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan's tally of tortured children, to let them think out loud, and those chapters are why people still read it. Use the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which keeps Dostoevsky's rough, talky, almost unhinged Russian instead of smoothing it into polite English.