Heartof Darkness

In a slightly unexpected display of commitment, I have read another book - Conrad's Heart of Darkness, described as "the first 20th century novel". To be fair, it's very short - 100 pages - which somewhat makes up for the length of the Count of Monte Cristo. I may have read it too quickly as it hasn't made much of an impact on me. The novel is based on the first-person narrative of a sailor describing a voyage he made into the "heart of darkness" - Africa. It's very much reflective of its time, and I found the casual approach to enslaving the "natives" difficult - his first experience on arriving in Africa is seeing a chain gang, who are dispassionately described but clearly on the brink of starvation, over worked, and uncared for. I understand that this is in part a reflection of the time - but it was written in 1890, a good half-century after slavery was outlawed, and so I would have expected the mentality to have changed. I always find it difficult to engage with the characters in a novel where they display these sort of attitudes - the natives are not really acknowledged as people at all, and the narrator expresses surprise when he finds that he is sad "in a way" about the death of one of those travelling with him ... because he had become used to keeping him in order. Other than this, it's one of those novels which isn't so much about events as about creating an impression and atmosphere via descriptions of places...I have a tendency to skim-read descriptions, looking for the real action, so I suspect I haven't really taken the best out of it. Certainly very readable, but I didn't find that it particularly engaged me. What to read next? I have a horrible feeling that it's time to take on Middlemarch, or possibly another Dickens or Russian extravaganza!