I never made it through Crime and Punishment; The Idiot grabbed me from the beginning. I remember finding the mc appealing; it has been a few years so I forgot why.
The translation might have had something to do with it. With some classic foreign language novels there is more than one, so I sometimes read first the few pages of each one before I choose which version I will go with; some flow better than others. I swear sometimes the translation can be the difference between enjoying a novel and not.
That's probably very true. The only translated work I've read is the Odyssey, which I found to be quite boring, but it was probably the translation. I'll definitely give The Idiot a try!