Heart of Darkness

There are a lot of books that are classics that many people had to read in school, and usually, that results in them having a bad experience with the book, or being disinclined to enjoy reading at all. My school failed me in that regard, the only classics I ever had to read for school were Of Mice and Men and Catcher in the Rye.

This resulted in me being a fully grown adult reader with nearly a thousand books read, but hardly any of them being classics. I've been trying to rectify that. Some classics are incredible, even today. Some I respect, but didn't resonate with me. And some are so mind numbingly boring that I thank the lucky stars that no English teacher subjected me to them, lest I have been scared away from my love of reading forever.

I listened to this book on audio, narrated by the superb Kenneth Branagh, who you may know from many things but is best known for my generation from playing Professor Lockhart in Harry Potter. Branagh did a wonderful job; and I was still bored to tears. I can't tell you really anything that happened. There was darkness, and Africa, and Kurtz. But it was all a drudge. In a week, it might as well have been that I never read this.

I'm sure it has literary merit. Far be it from me, hundreds of years after its been hailed as great work, for me to dismiss it utterly. But on audio, dissecting prose and literary merit is much harder for me. If the book had engaged me AT ALL, I might have been inclined to read this physically, slower, and pondered whatever literary or philosophical accolades it supposedly has. But alas, I would rather read a dictionary or a soap ingredients list. And so Heart of Darkness finds its way into the cobwebs of my mind; another box to check off in the list of “classics”, utterly forgotten until someone at a party in a decade mentions it, and I respond with, “Ah yeah, I read that. Kurtz, huh?” and change the subject to a more interesting book.