HEART OF DARKNESS (Joseph Conrad) - September 30/10

The horror, the horror. This absolutely abysmal book takes almost 120 pages to tell a story I can sum up in one sentence: some dude heads out into the jungle to find a missing ivory trader named Kurtz, but is shocked to discover that Kurtz has gone native and is ruling over his underlings with an iron fist. That's it, yet Conrad rambles on incessantly page after page and just goes insane describing everything in sight. There's no plot here, nor are there any interesting characters. It's just a pretentious mess, pure and simple. At least it's (relatively) short. no stars out of ****