Hi everyone! I know it's crunch time, but I would really like some feedback on my common app essay. It's 549 words, so I am a bit worried about whether or not it seems about the right word count. Also, I'm afraid it is a bit generic.
The essay prompt is:
Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
The Timeless Time Machines
Last summer, I murdered a pawnbroker and her sister with an axe...or at least that is what I felt I had done. A few months ago, I spent weeks reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I would read at night when my house was so silent you could faintly hear the neighbor's television airing the latest episode of David Letterman. With a lone lamp lighting up a corner of my room, I would sprawl out on my bed and read. My eyes ran over each word, slowly but surely comprehending what message Dostoevsky was trying to convey.
Hundreds of thin pages bound by a slightly thicker cover suddenly morphed into a time machine. Each time I opened the book, I was no longer in 21st-century Hawaii, but 19th-century Russia. I could inhale the warm, musty air of St. Petersburg; I was living in an inadequately-sized garret. As Raskolnikov killed in cold blood, chills went down my spine and I couldn't take my eyes away.
Soon enough, I finished all 542 pages, and it was a bittersweet feeling to set the book on my shelf. It was then, however, that I realized my outlook on the world had changed. Here I was, reading Russian literature for the first time in my life, and I had no idea how the world was so diverse. I myself am multicultural, but where I live, home is a melting pot of all these different cultures fused into one colossal culture. Living on an island in the middle of the Pacific has provided a sort of isolation from the rest of the world for me, and I started to thirst for knowledge.
What else was out there in the world that I could learn about? Reading was my best bet, as it is through this that one is able to gain a perspective different from the tourism sites. Each book turned into a time machine, and each one threw me into a different setting. I visited Paris at the turn of the 20th century in Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Conrad's Heart of Darkness took me to the Congo in the 1900s. I was a witness of the Trojan War in Homer's The Iliad. I especially loved the New York lifestyle in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Traveling to all these various places through these clusters of words printed on paper has never been so exhilarating! And all of these priceless adventures have been inspired from a six dollar book I read over the summer. If it wasn't for Crime and Punishment, then I would still be slightly ignorant about what is happening with the other six billion people in the other 200 or so nations in the world. Dostoevsky's novel has inspired me in ways I cannot explain, and it has also influenced me to read more books to feel more inspiration.
I may not be an axe murderer or an "angel of music". I haven't ventured up the Congo River or past the walls of Troy. I do not even live the life of a New York socialite. However, I am always able to live the experiences through literature because not only does it bring these places to life, but it also makes me feel awake and alive as well.
Comments are appreciated and I can help you with your essays if you need help as well.
I think your problem is here: "Dostoevsky's novel has inspired me in ways I cannot explain, and it has also influenced me to read more books to feel more inspiration."
The essay is asking you to explain precisely HOW it inspired you. The entire purpose is to explain it, so you can't get away with saying "this novel has inspired me ways I cannot explain." You are almost skirting the question entirely.
Maybe you could bring up a specific event in which you recall using a lesson learned from a book?
Your essay is well-written, and I like where it's going, but you're lacking a unifying theme...what precisely do you want to convey? What's your ultimate point? Do you want to say that you're now smarter? Or maybe now you are more sensitive to other viewpoints, and are thus more willing to hear opposing opinions? Pick something like that and use it to tie your essay together.
Best of luck!
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