Broadening Horizons

That’s what I’m trying to do anyways. Well, at least in a literary sense. As I mentioned before, I will read pretty much any book, but a lot fall in my hands through recommendations. I have read a lot of books, but I seem to have missed a lot of the classics along the way.  So when I stumbled across a blog posting by my cousin, I saw it as a bucket list, or a challenge of sorts.

At the top of the list, it stated that:

“The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.”

Seems like a challenge to me.

So I copied down the list and started going through it. I have read 11 on the list. Out of the ones I haven’t read, I would say at least a third of them I won’t read…Tolkien, The Complete Works of Shakespeare…I use my copy of that as a weight when I do crafts ;) But I do own it!

Then my next step was to get on Amazon and do my favourite thing EVER....book shopping!

The reason I write this blog today is that I just finished one of the “classics” on the list. “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. I really think that I deserve a prize for finishing it. A reward of some kind because it was BRUTAL!

I couldn’t get around the language and I didn’t really get the story. Apparently the book is describing the “raw brutality of colonialism” and the “evils of imperialism”. This was completely lost on me. I got that it was about a seaman telling a story about his adventures to his comrades. He talks about a journey to the Congo to rescue? assist? search for? work with? a dude named Kurtz. I got that there were some corpses on the road along the way, but to say that the book painted a picture of the "barbarism with vivid imagery" seems a little exaggerated for me. Maybe in the late 1800's when the book was written, but I missed the genocide that was supposedly being committed through the novel.

One critic even went so far as to say: "Only problem I see (with the book) is that the ending is not very good-it is very emotional and sad and I expected a better ending"...I missed the sad and emotional part I guess, just trying to get it finished!
 
I think that this one was waaaay smarter than me. Way smarter! I’m just hoping that the next few books I tackle off the list are a little better (and dumb-ed down for me) than this one or I may just drop out of my personal challenge and go back to reading “vampire crack” , as my sister calls it. (Looking for a good read? The Black Dagger Brotherhood, a series by J.R. Ward…FANTASTIC easy, enjoyable, smutty reading! And I’m not even into the vampire-cult thing but LOVE these books.)
Cheers!