Heart of Darkness is a pretty great classic! But my gosh, this 100-page novella took me so long to read because of its slow start...
I have to read this book for an English course and I'd recommend it to anyone that loves wordy, well-written, poetic, slow, and descriptive literature. It reminded me a lot of Lord of the Flies by William Golding, although I dare say I enjoyed that book more than this one.
I think what hurts this book for me is its slow first part. In the first sentences you are bombarded with complex descriptions of the setting and nautical terms that are hard to explain in a few words. Everything about the first few pages were hard to follow in my opinion. It got a bit better, but not so much. One night I spent around an hour and a half reading only 15 pages of the book. I got pretty hopeless. I kept feeling as though I would never enjoy it and I thought the book was incredibly pretentious.
However, after a few tries, I finally reached the second part, and the book instantly started becoming a lot better. The plot started to move along and the author's style seemed a lot more simplistic than it was in the first part. It still was by no means simple, but it was a lot easier to follow. Before I knew it, one night I read the whole third part of the book in an hour and a half. I was heavily invested in the story by that point, and the ending was incredible and hard to stop thinking about.
I think the moral of the story here is that there are some books that just don't resonate with you in the first chunk, but if you commit to reading them, you're in for some great art. I similarly had this problem with (guess what) Lord of the Flies when I read it a while back. The first chapter was really hard to follow and sit through, then all of a sudden, I became more and more intrigued until I was completely invested near the end of the book. I dunno. There's something about old books that make them have this horrible, hopeless start, but when you invest your time into them you can really start to see why they are so well liked.
What about you? Have there been some books that were incredibly hard to get into, but once you perservered, you really liked them?
