Well, eventually (about two years later or so) I could, and for whatever it's worth, I think that Crime and Punishment should be mandatory reading for high school kids. As most of Dostoievski's works, it highlights the miseries of late nineteenth-century Russia, and it does this while drawing out one of the most complex characters (Raskolnikov) of universal literature. And the two aspects (the external and the internal world) are beautifully laid out together and often placed in contrast to one another.