Lord Jim
This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character who reaches the status of a literary hero.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2011–2022years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recently read Lord Jim (1900) by Joseph Conrad and really enjoyed it. There is a dense playfulness with words in a way that doesn't exist in my diet of Internet reading. The plot is unfurled from questionable narrators, deft time shifts, and overall is compelling and peppered with ethical dilemmas.
Standard E-books made an excellently formatted version: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/joseph-conrad/lord-jim
- Until maybe 5 years ago, I would read almost anything. This is great for discovery, but sucks when you have to plow through an abysmal book. I remember vividly reading the sequel of Dracula by a descendant (and a handful of ghostwriter) of Bram Stocker. This was terrible, full of cliché, badly written...
So now I am actually planning what I am going to read next. There are lots of classic to chose from. Admittedly some are boring. Last year, I have really enjoyed Lord Jim, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness.
I always have a "to read next" list with 10-20 books in it.
- There's a passage in the introduction to one of Joseph Conrad's books, I think it's Lord Jim, where he's puzzled by a reader's reaction to the book: An Italian lady found something "morbid".
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
