Best read of 2026 so far was written in 1880

The part that made me laugh out loud: Dostoyevsky's description of medicine becoming "too specialized" — one doctor for the right nostril and another for the left. That's from a conversation between Ivan and the devil. Written in 1880. The rest of the novel is like that too — the narrator is semi-omniscient but explicitly unreliable and self-conscious about it, the characters' inner lives contradict their stated beliefs, and the psychological model overall is more sophisticated than most of what we use in social science today.