I read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym for the first time when I was nine years old, after receiving a volume of the Complete Edgar Allen Poe as a gift. While I devoured the short stories and the poetry multiple times, this, Poe's only novel, was read by me once, and I'm not even able to remember if I finished it. I picked this up to read in preparation to read Mat Johnson's satire, Pym (excellent, 5 stars btw.) Man, did I ever hate this. It was so excruciating to read, whether by design (to demonstrate the dual-authorship as described in the preface gimick) or just because Poe didn't "get" the concept of a novel, I couldn't really tell.

The thing that frustrated me most, was the long boring descriptions and tangents that read more like encyclopedia articles. As if Poe, perhaps unable to break out of his short-story-mentality, was creating "filler" to draw out his work into the length suitable for a novel. I think at one point he described storms or something (I really lost focus, it was so boring) for about 20 really long paragraphs, and in the next killed off 13 people in the course of four sentences. That's the exciting part that should have been expanded, Edgar! Maddening!

And Pym and Augustus -- what idiots they were! It was comical how stupid they were. That's actually what probably saved this from being a one-star review. I would read, get all infuriated with how preposterous they were and/or how Poe totally barely touched on the interesting stuff in favor of boring crap I could care less about, and it made me laugh. Like I said, I don't know if Poe wrote it this way on purpose, but I think I almost respect it more if he did. I drove my husband nuts telling him what crazy thing the idiotic characters did, or how deranged Poe must have been while writing certain sections.

Anyway, I'm glad I reread it so I'd have a better foundation before reading Johnson's Pym, but I'm unlikely to ever read it a third time. I've always been a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe, but his only novel (and thank God there was only this one!) was, for the most part, not a pleasant read.