The Secret Agent -- Joseph Conrad

Get this:  Joseph Conrad didn't speak English until he was in his twenties.  Crazy, right? 

This book, in a nutshell (from Chapter 5):

The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. 

The reviews at Amazon of this book are mixed.  I'm coming down squarely on the pro-Secret Agent side.  (Squarely enough that I've decided to try Heart of Darkness again--granted, the last time I tried it I was in high school, but sometimes these things take longer than they should).

Depending on the frame of mind you're in going into it, The Secret Agent could be described as a satire, a tragedy, a thriller or just plain historical fiction.  Rather than a story of a specific genre, I saw it more as a story about desperate people.  And of course, it's a story about terrorism. I found it much more relevant to our world & time than I expected.

This passage was in reference to the Professor--the only character that I found truly frightening:

He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers.  They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror, too, perhaps.

Brrr...  It gives me the willies.  Partly, I think, because I know that feeling.  It only came on me in brief flashes, but it was one of the reasons that I wanted out of the city so badly.  (Also, my goodness.  Joseph Conrad loved commas even more than me!)