Travels With a Donkey
I had only ever read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which I thought ok, and Treasure Island which was a childhood favorite of Stevenson’s works.
Travels With a Donkey seemed a very modern work. Stevenson wrote about religious schism with a self-conciously tolerant air, about poverty and ignorance as local curiosities and about his own agnoscticism as a self-evident necessity. He was indulgent, tolerant and quite superior to everyone and everything he met. In other word: insufferable. The book is slim and the prose is smooth so it wasn’t difficult, just disagreeable.