For those who have detested Heart of Darkness, some understanding and some comments:
I once read a commentary by a critic who said "Students are taught to hate William Faulkner by being forced to read The Sound and the Fury". He was exactly right. Sound&Fury is absolutely not the first Faulkner novel you should read. Nor the second nor the third.
Which doesn't mean it's a bad or unrewarding novel. Just that it's difficult, until you have absorbed more of what Faulkner's writing is about.
The same thing applies to Heart of Darkness. Conrad shares a lot of similar qualities with Faulkner. He is not the simplest, most transparent of fiction writers, and his writing has an evolutionary track. He has a prose rhythm and quality different from a lot of writers, and worthy of cultivation. But you don't start with H of D. You start with things like the shorts "The Lagoon" and "Youth" and "Falk" and the novels Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim and Victory. Then maybe Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Then read Heart of Darkness.
caw