It's a classic that I just never managed to get around to reading for as long as I can remember. I'm a big history buff, with historical fiction ranking right behind it, and I'll admit I found it pretty enjoyable in that way you can really appreciate a classic. The dialogue at times was a bit of a task (allus = always, "hither and thither" was another common one), but I liked it.

I saw a few of the reviews on Good Reads bashing it, but a lot of the reasoning took root in the more contemporary way of telling stories. This is a classic in that it was written in 1894 as part of a serial collection for a Philly newspaper, and then made into a novel one year later. It's true to the way people spoke at the time. I mean, imagine being a veteran of the Civil War and reading a novel about it 30 years later that didn't glorify battle, but instead showed the inhumane, if not slightly insane, parts of being a soldier.

If I had one gripe with this one, it's that the author constantly refers to the protagonist as "The Youth," which was oddly reminiscent of "The Old Man" in Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea." But again, those two books were roughly 60 years apart, and even Hemingway himself said The Red Badge of Courage was the first of its kind.

Interested to see what others feel about this one.