Read The Brothers Karamazov with me! August 2026

I absolutely loved our discussion on Sunday! It was tremendous fun and I am so glad that everyone is enjoying the book! Since we are near the mid-point we are going to take a week off the reading group to give people the chance to catch up, since work or family or life-in-general can sometimes get in the way of more important things, like reading a thousand-page book. After that, our schedule for the next few weeks will be as follows:

Saturday 15th August: Book VII: Alyosha

Saturday 22nd August: Book VIII. Up to chapter 6 (“Here I come!”). There is, unfortunately, no neat way to divide this book in two, so this will seem like a somewhat abrupt ending.

Saturday 29th August: Up to the end of book VIII

Saturday 5th September: Book IX: Up to chapter 6 (“The public procurator catches Mitya).

Saturday 12th September: Up to the end of Book IX

Sunday 13th September: Live call (for paid subscribers only)

We are now properly into the action of the book, so I think this will be a really fun series of chapters to read. It also contains some of my favourite of Dostoevsky’s writing, specifically in Book VII, and the fable of the onion.

Apart from Book VII, much of these chapters will focus on Dmitri, and his passions. Mitya is such an interesting character because he is so frequently caricatured as just a clone of Fyodor Pavlovich, but he is so much more complex (and, I think, sympathetic) than that. In book IX, we also get some of Dostoevsky’s more explicit commentary on the Russian police and court system, which will be quite a major aspect of the latter parts of the book. I probably won’t focus too much on these themes in my posts, because ultimately it is of more historical interest than philosophical, but I’ll try to give as much context as I can.

Also, I mentioned this on the call, but once you have got past Book VI, you are firmly beyond the point where most people have given up or lost interest, so congratulations! You can kind of tell that the second-half is less widely read because less of it has seeped into our general cultural set of references. The Grand Inquisitor is very famous, but the equally brilliant semi-supernatural book XI is talked about far less often.

Other News:

I have been thinking a lot recently about the future of the channel and of “Unsolicited Advice” more generally. I am now firmly of the belief that I want to gradually do more on Substack, and slightly less on Youtube. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that Substack is far less algorithmically captured than Youtube, because it has an email list, and this allows for a far wider range of things I can write. I can do works-in-progress, and write articles of wildly different lengths, in a way that Youtube would not really make possible. I also just love running the reading group. My goal with my Youtube channel has always been to encourage people to read the books I talk about for themselves, and I imagine that does sometimes happen on Youtube, but running reading groups is obviously much closer to directly achieving this goal. This is not to say I am going to stop posting on Youtube - I still really enjoy it. But I want to be at a point where I am 50:50 between Youtube and Substack.

I also like the community aspect of Substack, and especially our live calls. There were multiple times this month where I was reading The Brothers Karamazov, and thought to myself “I wonder what so-and-so would think about this”, and then having the privilege of actually finding out! It has always been a pipe-dream of mine to have a little philosophical community, and I think the beginnings of that are taking shape.

At the moment I am writing a single paid article per week, and the reading group. I want to gradually bump that up to 2 paid articles per week, and I am thinking of running another reading group some time next year.

In terms of videos this month, I am currently turning the Simone Weil reading group posts into a video, which I am excited to put out. Apart from that, I have planned two more videos: one on the later Wittgenstein, and one on Kierkegaard and looksmaxxing, but I am not sure which one I will make first. I also want to make a video on Jacques Cotteau’s Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, but there is just no way of doing the whole thing any justice whatsoever as it is so dense and detailed. But I might do a video on a few select chapters, specifically concerning the physical ins-and-outs of Dostoevsky’s writing process.

Thank you again to all my paid subscribers, both here and on Patreon! It is through your support that I continue to be able to do what I love. I know I put this at the end of almost every one of these monthly updates, but it remains true, and a truth repeated is no less true for the familiarity.

Excited to start this month’s reading, and also do let me know if you have suggestions for the next book. At this rate we will finish The Brothers Karamazov by the beginning of November, and then I will compile all the posts into one big video to (hopefully) go out by the beginning of December. The posts all together (I write them on a single Google Doc) have just passed 25,000 words, and I suspect it will be north of 50,000 by the time the book is finished. If past impressions are anything to go on, that will probably be a 4-5 hour video, though when I go back and edit the script I will try to cut any redundancies.

I have attempted to write a video for The Brothers Karamazov in the past, and I have tried to structure it thematically. This has always failed because there are just so many themes and so much that happens that it’s clear the video would be incomprehensible to someone who did not already know The Brothers K in quite a lot of depth. I actually think following the structure of the reading group posts, where the plot gets revealed and each section is analysed as we go along, will work a lot better.

Either way, looking forward to the next month :). See you all soon!