銀河鉄道の夜

I wanted to read 銀河鉄道の夜 since it's a classic that is referenced fairly often in other Japanese media. Unfortunately, it was a complete slog, was somewhat confusing, and was frustrating to read for several reasons. Here are the main issues I had with the book:

• Not enough kanji. There are long strings of kana because a relatively low amount of kanji is used. This can occasionally make parsing sentences difficult.
• Inconsistent kanji usage. Many words are written multiple ways. One example is 青白い versus 青じろい. This happens dozens if not hundreds of times throughout the book, and was quite frustrating. The bizarre thing is that this didn't just happen with words written pages or chapters apart. It would sometimes happen in back to back sentences or paragraphs.
• There are so many references not only to constellations (understandably), but also to plants and animals used to metaphorically describe the galaxy or the constellations themselves. Most of these references went over my head, even after looking up the words in English. This isn't the book's fault per se, but it did come off as a little overly descriptive for my taste.
• Missing sections of the book. There were a few points in the book where nothing was ever written, and it just skipped to the next scene with a note indicating that the section was missing.
• Even putting all the above issues aside, the story wasn't all that interesting. It was mostly just a lot of talking and a lot of describing things, with little to no payoff at the end.

Most of the above issues probably come from the fact that the book was published posthumously. Besides the missing sections, I imagine it never went through rigorous revisions or editing. However, none of that changes the fact that it was a frustrating book to read.