Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are brought to face our psychological selves to answer, ‘Who is the true savage?’. Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity.
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41recommend
112mentions
103people
2008–2026years
38% recommend57% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recommend reading "the Heart of Darkness" about some pristine unbombed idyllic stretches of the Congo river. Written by a totally English person as well, Joseph Conrad.
...
Actually, no, by an immigrant from Poland.
- Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
- god dang, how could I forget Heart of Darkness?
well I guess I know what I'm re-reading next.
- Why would anyone pretend to read Heart of Darkness? At 40k words it's one of the shortest novels ever written. The writing absolutely slaps. Anyone with any interest and experience in literature would find their first encounter with this book to be pleasant (except for the racism and colonialism).
And it's falling out of favor because of the racism and colonialism, so it's perfectly acceptable (in most literature circles) to say that you just didn't want to read that kind of crap and leave it at that.
I'm re-reading Heart of Darkness now and not likely to mention it to anyone because it's so regressive.
- Some recent books that really enriched my life:
- "Ace: What asexuality reveals about desire, society, and the meaning of sex" by Angela Chen. Really helped me understand my ace friends better.
- "Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving" by Pete Walker. Helped me recover from a lot of trauma that was causing me duress
- "The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles C. Mann. Helped me recover from anxiety disorder caused by climate change.
- "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey. As a former competitive gamer, this really helped me step back from competition and just enjoy the game.
- "Neurotribes" by Steve Silberman. Great book about the history of autism. Extremely sad but hopeful book.
- "Different Loving" by Brame, Jacobs, and Brame. A fascinating look back in time to the kink world of the 90s.
For fun I recently read and enjoyed: Foundation, Project Hail Mary (who's cutting onions in here), Going Postal, God Emperor of Dune, and Heart of Darkness.
- Thank God. Saying Conrad wrote favorably about Colonialism is so completely wrong and crazy some would say. Heart of Darkness was one of the most anti-colonial books of the 19th century.
