Saturday, March 9, 2013

2013 read #35: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
110 pages
Published 1902
Read March 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I found myself with an alarming lack of things to say about this book. Maybe it's best to get inoculated with it in high school, that way its effect isn't diluted through exposure to movies and jokes and pop culture osmosis, and as a bonus you get someone holding your hand as you putter through its motifs and meaning. Not that I don't get the gist, you understand; I just think I'd get more out of it in a literature course or something like that. Knowing the punchline ahead of time, as it were, what I mostly noticed was the appalling racism endemic to Conrad's time and place. It's still an interesting and tolerably well-written book for all my familiarity, but yeah, a lot of the impact was wasted on me. It doesn't help that I burned through this book in an afternoon, only giving it half my attention.

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