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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
this was a book i thought i had to read, than decided of course i don't have to if i don't want to - and am i really going to spend so much time reading up on dry pages full of whalehunting facts? and then i did read it - or listened to it, mostly, and it was incredible.
at times incredibly engaging, dragging me along the whole adventurous journey. at times incredibly beautiful or profound. and sometimes just incredibly dumb and funny.
at times incredibly engaging, dragging me along the whole adventurous journey. at times incredibly beautiful or profound. and sometimes just incredibly dumb and funny.
this was a book i thought i had to read, than decided of course i don't have to if i don't want to - and am i really going to spend so much time reading up on dry pages full of whalehunting facts? and then i did read it - or listened to it, mostly, and it was incredible.
at times incredibly engaging, dragging me along the whole adventurous journey. at times incredibly beautiful or profound. and sometimes just incredibly dumb and funny.
at times incredibly engaging, dragging me along the whole adventurous journey. at times incredibly beautiful or profound. and sometimes just incredibly dumb and funny.
u think it's hot now??? wait till herman melville goes to hell for making me read moby dick!!!!!
I've read this book a couple of times now and it's just an awesome book. I love it.
April 16, 2022
Dear Herman,
I hope you don’t mind me calling you “Herman”. I feel like we’ve spent enough time together to be on a first name basis, and it is the 21st century. We have a history, you and I. Back in April of 1996 I asked my book group to read your novel Moby-Dick or The Whale. I thought it was a great selection. No one had read it, and how could we call ourselves well-read if we hadn’t read your American classic of Ahab, Ismael, Starbuck, Queequeg, Stubbs, Pip, and of course The White Whale. I had a copy of your novel from my great uncle Robert Pike Whitten (doesn’t he sound like someone from New England!) so I dove right in, and finished the novel fairly quickly. All was well until I started to hear grumblings from book club members that your novel was much too long, there were too many digressions, too many descriptions of whales and their classifications, it was a slog to get through, and so on. I was rather astounded and thought to myself, have we read the same novel!? Well…come to find out, we had not read the same novel. Can you believe that someone published your novel in an abbreviated form? And why did my college professor great uncle have it in his collection? Why didn’t I notice the word “abridged” in the front matter of the book? I’ll never know the answers to these questions. Suffice it say, I wasn’t very popular in my book group for awhile.
Fast forward 26 years later, April 2022. I can now truthfully say that I’ve read your epic novel. I even have two UNABRIDGED copies: the Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition with a forward by one of your current champions, Nathaniel Philbrick and the Third Norton Critical Edition edited by Hershel Parker which has all kinds of juicy additional stuff. I can understand why my book group had some difficulty with the digressions, what Nathaniel Philbrick, calls “majestic digressions” in his short book Why Read Moby-Dick. However, I enjoyed your tale. It especially surprised me with it’s humor. I’ll never forget the “marriage bed” scenes with Ismael and Queequeg in The Spouter Inn. Classic! Or the full-frontal eroticism in the chapter called “A Squeeze of the Hand” or the over the top pun in the last sentence of the chapter “The Cassock”! I think your digressions, humor, and eroticism made the tragic and deeply disturbing sections sneak up on me. I wasn’t prepared for poor Pip going mad, for Starbuck’s heartbreaking grief, knowing he would never see his dear wife and children again, for the grisly and brutal whale hunts, for Ahab’s three final chases of Moby-Dick, for his diabolical and single-minded purpose. I suspect I missed some things and a re-read of your work would likely bring new astonishments. For now, I’m going to let Moby-Dick swim on, and move to a biography of you written by a humanities professor named Andrew Delbanco. You see Herman, you and your classic novel have not been forgotten. Not by a long shot.
Your reader,
Robin
Dear Herman,
I hope you don’t mind me calling you “Herman”. I feel like we’ve spent enough time together to be on a first name basis, and it is the 21st century. We have a history, you and I. Back in April of 1996 I asked my book group to read your novel Moby-Dick or The Whale. I thought it was a great selection. No one had read it, and how could we call ourselves well-read if we hadn’t read your American classic of Ahab, Ismael, Starbuck, Queequeg, Stubbs, Pip, and of course The White Whale. I had a copy of your novel from my great uncle Robert Pike Whitten (doesn’t he sound like someone from New England!) so I dove right in, and finished the novel fairly quickly. All was well until I started to hear grumblings from book club members that your novel was much too long, there were too many digressions, too many descriptions of whales and their classifications, it was a slog to get through, and so on. I was rather astounded and thought to myself, have we read the same novel!? Well…come to find out, we had not read the same novel. Can you believe that someone published your novel in an abbreviated form? And why did my college professor great uncle have it in his collection? Why didn’t I notice the word “abridged” in the front matter of the book? I’ll never know the answers to these questions. Suffice it say, I wasn’t very popular in my book group for awhile.
Fast forward 26 years later, April 2022. I can now truthfully say that I’ve read your epic novel. I even have two UNABRIDGED copies: the Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition with a forward by one of your current champions, Nathaniel Philbrick and the Third Norton Critical Edition edited by Hershel Parker which has all kinds of juicy additional stuff. I can understand why my book group had some difficulty with the digressions, what Nathaniel Philbrick, calls “majestic digressions” in his short book Why Read Moby-Dick. However, I enjoyed your tale. It especially surprised me with it’s humor. I’ll never forget the “marriage bed” scenes with Ismael and Queequeg in The Spouter Inn. Classic! Or the full-frontal eroticism in the chapter called “A Squeeze of the Hand” or the over the top pun in the last sentence of the chapter “The Cassock”! I think your digressions, humor, and eroticism made the tragic and deeply disturbing sections sneak up on me. I wasn’t prepared for poor Pip going mad, for Starbuck’s heartbreaking grief, knowing he would never see his dear wife and children again, for the grisly and brutal whale hunts, for Ahab’s three final chases of Moby-Dick, for his diabolical and single-minded purpose. I suspect I missed some things and a re-read of your work would likely bring new astonishments. For now, I’m going to let Moby-Dick swim on, and move to a biography of you written by a humanities professor named Andrew Delbanco. You see Herman, you and your classic novel have not been forgotten. Not by a long shot.
Your reader,
Robin
Absolutely remarkable that a book that is 80% whaling encyclopedia and 15% literary analysis of its own themes can have 5% so profound that it makes all 650 pages completely worth it.
"I'm planning to start reading Moby-Dick," I messaged my wife.
"Is that supposed to cure your boredom??" she replied.
PART ONE: THE PRELUDE
Confession time: I studied English Education for four years, trained to be a high school English/Literature teacher, and yet never once cracked the cover on Moby-Dick. "Why bother?" I figured. "Somebody else has done the work already and everything that can be said must have been said by now." Yes, it was on some AP Literature "suggested reading" lists and it was offered as a class unto itself for seniors majoring in American Lit, but it never came up on a required course syllabus for me and I wasn't about to complain. If I did have to teach it to a class in the future, there would always be Cliff's Notes.
Confession continued: I do not like big books. Some readers love 'em, but not me. There are a handful of exceptions (obligatory plug for my personal white whale, Infinite Jest) but for the most part if a book goes past 350 pages I tend to lose interest. My feeling is, if you're going over that then you'd better have a darn good reason. I've always preferred minimalism, the Kurt Vonnegut approach, saying more with less. And Moby-Dick has the reputation of being just the opposite: the most overlong, overblown, overloaded novel of all. Critical consensus has it that Melville earns a pass on this, yet still every contemporary review cautions at some point: you will be bored.
Confession the third: I have grown into the smug literary hipster snob I used to mock as out-of-touch, trying too hard, and unbearable at parties. But now I'm a grown man, approaching middle age if not there already, and I find a lot of the dusty old "Classics" actually speak to me on a profound level. So maybe I won't have anything new to say about MD, but maybe that's OK. Maybe I don't need to say anything at all. Maybe I need to listen.
First things first: it's not as long as I thought. I always envisioned some thousand-plus page tome but my copy (W.W. Norton & Company's 1976 version, which I chose because it presents the full text with minimal commentary, limited to just a single chapter at the very end penned by one Howard Mumford Jones—now THERE'S a stodgy old literature critic name if I've ever heard one!) runs a total of 585 pages, glossary included. Sure, it'll make one hell of a thump if you drop it from any distance to your desktop. But it's not the forearm workout I feared. And as the last book of my 2018 reading challenge, I've got over a month to get through it. (50 days, a quick calendar consultation confirms. 12 pages a day? Seems do-able.)
Second things second: I already know the gist of it. It seems like it's about a whale but the whale is a symbol and it's really about obsession. The color white is important to pay attention to. I'm supposed to call him Ishmael, and he alone survives to tell the tale, and Ahab stabs at thee from Hell's heart but gets himself killed in the endeavor. I don't think anyone can cry foul over spoilers more than a hundred and sixty years old, and this sucker's so far intertwined into the popular culture that it'd be a miracle if I didn't already know how it ends. But this is about the journey, not the destination.
So I'll set sail on waters that have been charted and recharted already, and I'll keep my little reading log here so I can feel brainy for taking up this undertaking, here on the Internet haven for other brainy folks who love books so much we tell strangers what we think about them, where reading Moby-Dick is the norm and not the exception and joining your voice to the chorus of other reviewers is practically a rite of passage.
PART TWO: THE READ-THROUGH
This part took 32 days. That's a good long while for any avid reader.
Listen. Anybody can write a book, technically speaking. A much smaller set of people can write an interesting, entertaining, or at least coherent book. But very few people can write a Great Book, a.k.a. Literature. Moby-Dick more or less sets the bar, in my estimation, for what we all mean when we say "Great Book" or "Classic Literature," which is to say: big lofty ideas, conveyed via dense but memorable text, reproducing human drama of grave thematic import. As others have already noted, it's not difficult to read, per se. But I honestly would have loathed reading this as an assignment, working against a deadline. Because the further we move into modernity and the more removed we get from Melville's world, the more antiquated his dialect becomes and thus the true challenge arises: can you focus your attention long enough to read this? Will you? And do you want to? That's the difficulty of Moby-Dick, more so than the plot or the imagery or any of the thematic grandeur. Anybody can "get" Moby-Dick. Many(/most) people probably already have, without even actually reading it for themselves, since it's been around long enough to work its way into popular culture of all forms.
And so, if Mark Twain is the American Oscar Wilde then Melville is the American Charles Dickens. Has anybody written a term paper on that yet? I think I found my thesis.
PART THREE: THE REFLECTION
So, I read Moby-Dick.
It was worth it.
It was worth it the way that eating leafy green vegetables is worth it. You might not enjoy every bite while you're doing it, but someday down the road you'll be glad you did.
Moby-Dick is a cultural icon, a touchstone for bookworms, an American legacy, and a darn fine book. It is surprisingly entertaining despite its lulls and its length and its reputation as a chore to get through, and it is well-deserving of its status as a work of literary art. In fact, knowing the book's reputation and other readers' aspersions against it beforehand somehow made reading it much more tolerable. Every time it grew tedious, the knowledge that I was participating in a shared experience with all the readers and reviewers who'd come before me helped to carry me through. And the critical analysis comes easily, as Melville never obscures his message. Most of the theme is all but stated outright in plain language, and the sumptuous writing reinforces through tone what we are to take away from it all: from Ishmael's openness, from Queequeg's dual dignity, from Ahab's dark obsession.
5 stars out of 5. It couldn't possibly be any less.
"Is that supposed to cure your boredom??" she replied.
PART ONE: THE PRELUDE
Confession time: I studied English Education for four years, trained to be a high school English/Literature teacher, and yet never once cracked the cover on Moby-Dick. "Why bother?" I figured. "Somebody else has done the work already and everything that can be said must have been said by now." Yes, it was on some AP Literature "suggested reading" lists and it was offered as a class unto itself for seniors majoring in American Lit, but it never came up on a required course syllabus for me and I wasn't about to complain. If I did have to teach it to a class in the future, there would always be Cliff's Notes.
Confession continued: I do not like big books. Some readers love 'em, but not me. There are a handful of exceptions (obligatory plug for my personal white whale, Infinite Jest) but for the most part if a book goes past 350 pages I tend to lose interest. My feeling is, if you're going over that then you'd better have a darn good reason. I've always preferred minimalism, the Kurt Vonnegut approach, saying more with less. And Moby-Dick has the reputation of being just the opposite: the most overlong, overblown, overloaded novel of all. Critical consensus has it that Melville earns a pass on this, yet still every contemporary review cautions at some point: you will be bored.
Confession the third: I have grown into the smug literary hipster snob I used to mock as out-of-touch, trying too hard, and unbearable at parties. But now I'm a grown man, approaching middle age if not there already, and I find a lot of the dusty old "Classics" actually speak to me on a profound level. So maybe I won't have anything new to say about MD, but maybe that's OK. Maybe I don't need to say anything at all. Maybe I need to listen.
First things first: it's not as long as I thought. I always envisioned some thousand-plus page tome but my copy (W.W. Norton & Company's 1976 version, which I chose because it presents the full text with minimal commentary, limited to just a single chapter at the very end penned by one Howard Mumford Jones—now THERE'S a stodgy old literature critic name if I've ever heard one!) runs a total of 585 pages, glossary included. Sure, it'll make one hell of a thump if you drop it from any distance to your desktop. But it's not the forearm workout I feared. And as the last book of my 2018 reading challenge, I've got over a month to get through it. (50 days, a quick calendar consultation confirms. 12 pages a day? Seems do-able.)
Second things second: I already know the gist of it. It seems like it's about a whale but the whale is a symbol and it's really about obsession. The color white is important to pay attention to. I'm supposed to call him Ishmael, and he alone survives to tell the tale, and Ahab stabs at thee from Hell's heart but gets himself killed in the endeavor. I don't think anyone can cry foul over spoilers more than a hundred and sixty years old, and this sucker's so far intertwined into the popular culture that it'd be a miracle if I didn't already know how it ends. But this is about the journey, not the destination.
So I'll set sail on waters that have been charted and recharted already, and I'll keep my little reading log here so I can feel brainy for taking up this undertaking, here on the Internet haven for other brainy folks who love books so much we tell strangers what we think about them, where reading Moby-Dick is the norm and not the exception and joining your voice to the chorus of other reviewers is practically a rite of passage.
PART TWO: THE READ-THROUGH
This part took 32 days. That's a good long while for any avid reader.
Listen. Anybody can write a book, technically speaking. A much smaller set of people can write an interesting, entertaining, or at least coherent book. But very few people can write a Great Book, a.k.a. Literature. Moby-Dick more or less sets the bar, in my estimation, for what we all mean when we say "Great Book" or "Classic Literature," which is to say: big lofty ideas, conveyed via dense but memorable text, reproducing human drama of grave thematic import. As others have already noted, it's not difficult to read, per se. But I honestly would have loathed reading this as an assignment, working against a deadline. Because the further we move into modernity and the more removed we get from Melville's world, the more antiquated his dialect becomes and thus the true challenge arises: can you focus your attention long enough to read this? Will you? And do you want to? That's the difficulty of Moby-Dick, more so than the plot or the imagery or any of the thematic grandeur. Anybody can "get" Moby-Dick. Many(/most) people probably already have, without even actually reading it for themselves, since it's been around long enough to work its way into popular culture of all forms.
And so, if Mark Twain is the American Oscar Wilde then Melville is the American Charles Dickens. Has anybody written a term paper on that yet? I think I found my thesis.
PART THREE: THE REFLECTION
So, I read Moby-Dick.
It was worth it.
It was worth it the way that eating leafy green vegetables is worth it. You might not enjoy every bite while you're doing it, but someday down the road you'll be glad you did.
Moby-Dick is a cultural icon, a touchstone for bookworms, an American legacy, and a darn fine book. It is surprisingly entertaining despite its lulls and its length and its reputation as a chore to get through, and it is well-deserving of its status as a work of literary art. In fact, knowing the book's reputation and other readers' aspersions against it beforehand somehow made reading it much more tolerable. Every time it grew tedious, the knowledge that I was participating in a shared experience with all the readers and reviewers who'd come before me helped to carry me through. And the critical analysis comes easily, as Melville never obscures his message. Most of the theme is all but stated outright in plain language, and the sumptuous writing reinforces through tone what we are to take away from it all: from Ishmael's openness, from Queequeg's dual dignity, from Ahab's dark obsession.
5 stars out of 5. It couldn't possibly be any less.
To be honest, I'm not even sure I absorbed most of it. I also spent a lot of the book having to remind myself that it's old because of its vocabulary.
Great story, great characters, great setting and, at times, great prose ... but Melville makes you wade through a lot of crap in the process.
Didn't really appreciate this until I picked it apart, but by bit, chapter by chapter.