It took me a while, but I finally finished reading “Lord Jim” by Joseph Conrad. And when I say “it took me a while,” I mean it took me years. As in, decades. I’m pretty sure I tried to read it for the first time forty years ago after I read “Heart of Darkness.” Probably gave up one or maybe even two chapters in. It’s four hundred plus pages of densely-packed multisyllabic prose, and a lot of those words I had to look up. Inferring the meaning doesn’t work when whole pages are filled with dozens of words I’m not familiar with.

On top of that, Conrad wrote it as if a guy named Marlowe was telling you the whole story, so every paragraph starts off with a quotation mark. Then, if someone is talking, there’s another quotation mark. And, if two people or more are talking, Conrad just jams the whole conversation into a single paragraph instead of starting a new line when each person says something. It doesn’t take long to lose track of who’s saying what. I had to read whole paragraphs three or four times just to make sure I knew who said what to whom.

After giving up the first time, I left the novel for years before picking it up again. Pretty sure I abandoned it after a couple chapters again. This happened over and over. The last time I failed to get through it was in the first or second year of the pandemic, but that time I got almost two hundred pages into it, which is pretty good momentum, but I just couldn’t keep it up. I don’t know what finally changed, but I started it about two weeks ago and kept on powering through it. Finished it last night.

Was it worth the effort? I have mixed feelings. The story is interesting. Jim, who doesn’t have a last name, is a man haunted by his past. He was the first mate on a ship when it hit something and started taking on water. He abandoned ship with the rest of the ship’s crew when they believed it was going to sink, only to find out later that it didn’t. There were 800 people aboard. So for the rest of his life he turns himself inside out for leaving those 800 people to die.

And Jim really should have had a hard look at himself for doing that, but he doesn’t. He runs away from his past. Literally runs away from everyone who brings it up, again and again, until he has finally retreated to the farthest reaches of human habitation where he makes himself over as a lord among the natives.

(There’s a lot of very casual, very brutal racism in this book, which is not surprising, given the time period Conrad’s writing about. There’s also a lot of misogyny for a book in which just one woman, Jim’s romantic interest, gets more than a mention. Jim calls her by a pet name, “Jewel,” and Marlow refers to her as “the girl” but Conrad never uses her real name, so she literally has no name at all.)

While I was looking for reading material day before yesterday I ran across a copy of God Bless You, Mister Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut, that I had squirreled away in an unseen corner of a bookshelf, flipped it open and started reading to see if the first few pages would hook me. Damned if they didn’t. I finished it early this morning after waking at three-thirty and finding I was unable to go back to sleep. Vonnegut’s writing has almost always held my interest even when I couldn’t say why, or that I understood what was going on. Mister Rosewater was an entertaining read but I couldn’t say why beyond “it was quirky and fun.”

I’ve been reading the Slow Horses books by Mick Herron, after watching the series on Apple TV. Good series, good books. So far I’ve read the first three books (Slow Horses, Real Tigers, Dead Lions) and I picked up the fourth book, Spook Street, from the library yesterday. Good spy thrillers, the whole lot of them. Would definitely recommend unreservedly. 

Before all that, I picked up a collection of Octavia Butler’s works published by the Library of America. Their collections are always good value for money, and I already knew I liked Butler after reading Wild Seed a year or two ago. This edition included the novel Kindred, which I read immediately, about a black woman from modern-day California who somehow travels back in time to antebellum Maryland. The novel’s not about time travel; there’s no explanation at all for how she gets there or gets back, it’s all about how she deals with being there, which Butler explores in detail. Can’t wait to read the rest of her work in this edition.

And before I picked up the collection of Butler, I found a collection of Joanna Russ, again published by Library of America, which included her novels The Female Man, We Who Are About To…, and One Strike Against God, as well as a half-dozen of her short stories. I read The Female Man way back in the day but wasn’t mature enough to appreciate its significance. And I remember reading We Who Are About To… when I was in high school or maybe college, but the kind of science fiction I was into back then focused on robots and battles against giant planet-killing bugs, and didn’t get into the depths of self-inspection that Russ’s novel went to. Again, I was not quite ready for that at the time. I’m pretty sure I had not read One Strike Against God before this; after mistakenly pigeonholing Russ as a sci-fi writer I wasn’t drawn to, I stopped looking into her books, and neither feminist lit nor lesbian lit were even on my radar until maybe sometime in the last 10-15 years. Too bad, because I would have benefited from reading One Strike long before this.