One thing for me was how light hearted and funny Lenin was. I expected it to be really hard going like a lot of Marx but he had such a wit about him and I remember laughing out loud a few times by his turn of phrase. I don’t think he gets enough credit for it, he took a really serious, dry subject and made it enjoyable to read. He really was an incredible writer.
How marxism helped me understand general politics.
Prior to reading theory, politics is a confusing mess that I couldn’t comprehend at all. I couldn’t comprehend why some corporation did X. There is so much politicsl disinformation that I felt like learning it is too much effort. (Autism doesn’t help. It sucks to struggle grasping the implied context of media, so they seem technically valid to me, even when it’s under a suspicious context.)
A large amount of political ideologies felt idealist and too abstract for me to grasp. I shrugged them off as just being choices.
After learning Marxism, I could finally understand some political systems and it’s far easier to predict actions from class interests.