The Nature of Things

So, I'm ticking boxes beside titles on the list of Books I Always Meant to Read But Never Did. Heart of Darkness - check. Another one bites the dust. This little book, published in 1899, has had an outsized influence on the world of art and the mind. Because of that, the story it tells is in the public domain and is a part of the culture, so even if we haven't read the book, we know the story. It is a short book, a novella almost by today's standards of doorstop-sized best sellers. I think it would be best read in one sitting, because the narrative is continuous with no obvious resting places. Unfortunately, I was not able to read it in one sitting, so I had to make my own rest stops within the narrative. That was disconcerting at times because when I picked up the book again, it was difficult to remember just where I was in the story.  Well, as I said, it was published in 1899, obviously another time and for a different audience, one that perhaps had more time to sit and ...

Earlier this year, I read and enjoyed  The Secret History of Costaguana  by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. That book was based on the germ of an idea from Conrad's  Nostromo . It was set in the fictional country invented by Conrad for his book. Reading that book made me curious about  Nostromo  and I added it to my reading list. I hardly knew what I was letting myself in for.  This was a very difficult read for me and it took me a seemingly interminable amount of time to finish it, but I persevered and did manage to read all the way to the end. Part of the difficulty lay in the fact that I read it on my Kindle. It might have been easier with a physical book where I could turn back and reread sections or refer to previous sections with greater ease. As it was, the story was very difficult to get into and I was fully one-third of the way through the book before I began to get a real sense of the story.  One problem that I had with the book was that Nostromo, the ...