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3.41 AVERAGE
3.41 AVERAGE
I don’t want to bash a classic but I just didn’t enjoy this. The actual story takes up maybe 50 pages in total. The rest is everything else in the world to do with whales. Reading about the massive whale hunting operations at a time when they’re an endangered species is more than a little cringeworthy. And of course we all know whales are not fish.
This is a tricky book to review. In terms of literary merit, “Moby Dick” is a really big deal, but it’s also kind of a pain in the ass to read. I’ve read classics that were like that before: long, in desperate need of an editor armed with a machete, but I usually ended up enjoying them; my favorite example of sacred doorstoppers that I slogged through but ended up loving at the end is “Anna Karenina”. It happens!
But “Moby Dick” was not as rewarding to me as many other books were. I can appreciate it for what it is and what it represents in the grand picture of American literature and literature in general, but I was very frustrated with it because I really really WANTED to like it! Alas...
“Moby Dick” is about so many things: whales (duh), the sea, male friendship, madness. All these things are fascinating themes, but maybe my brain is spoiled by action movies and psychological thrillers because I was really going in there expecting a lot more pathos and lot less practical lessons on harpoons and spermaceti conservation… It wasn’t character and plot driven enough to be a fun read. I settled for it to be an educational one and finished it nonetheless because I have a great respect for the ambition of the work, the clever techniques and the very real beauty of the prose. But I will not be picking it up again…
So 3 stars, because it is a great book. I just didn’t think it was a good one…
But “Moby Dick” was not as rewarding to me as many other books were. I can appreciate it for what it is and what it represents in the grand picture of American literature and literature in general, but I was very frustrated with it because I really really WANTED to like it! Alas...
“Moby Dick” is about so many things: whales (duh), the sea, male friendship, madness. All these things are fascinating themes, but maybe my brain is spoiled by action movies and psychological thrillers because I was really going in there expecting a lot more pathos and lot less practical lessons on harpoons and spermaceti conservation… It wasn’t character and plot driven enough to be a fun read. I settled for it to be an educational one and finished it nonetheless because I have a great respect for the ambition of the work, the clever techniques and the very real beauty of the prose. But I will not be picking it up again…
So 3 stars, because it is a great book. I just didn’t think it was a good one…
Easily one of the most literary books I've ever read. There were words and references I had to look up on almost every page. I loved it.
I'm also ready to take the whaleman's exam, or run a whaleship.
As well as the insane level of details about whales, it's a story of one man's musings on man's place in the universe, and another man's quest to exert his power over nature. I can't imagine this story has ever been translated well into film as it would surely miss the point of the book, and probably actually be about a whale hunt.
I'm also ready to take the whaleman's exam, or run a whaleship.
As well as the insane level of details about whales, it's a story of one man's musings on man's place in the universe, and another man's quest to exert his power over nature. I can't imagine this story has ever been translated well into film as it would surely miss the point of the book, and probably actually be about a whale hunt.
I am so conflicted on how to rate this book. I might come back later and change it...either with more or fewer stars...
when people ask me for queer novel recs i'm turning them to this im so serious.
would be 5 but there are deadass like hundreds of pages just discussing whale taxonomy
would be 5 but there are deadass like hundreds of pages just discussing whale taxonomy
I feel somehow cheap rating this only 3/5 stars but the reality is that while I'm glad I (finally) read it, I didn't really enjoy the vast majority of this vast book. I don't mind reading lengthy novels, and I was very excited for a rare opportunity to read this with the aid of someone who teaches it and considers it his favorite book. That helped, greatly, as I'm quite sure I would have quit during one of the roughly 75-80 chapters that are about whaling, or whales, or boats, or things that are certainly RELATED to our story but not SPECIFIC to our story. Well over half of the book is spent on these things (including not one but two consecutive chapters about whale as depicted by artists). Add in the floral language of 1851 and this is a TOUGH read.
And yet, the last 30 chapters or so, when we actually spend time on the Pequod with Captain Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb and yes, Ishmael ... these are really compelling and for sure a lot of that build up - both of understanding what the ship is like and also the consistent build up of dread and doom - works very, very well. I raced through this part of the book in one night, where the rest of the book took me almost a month.
Here's another question I can't quite shake - this story is told by the narrator who says to "Call me Ishmael." Throughout the book, there are numerous scenes we know Ishmael couldn't possibly have witnessed, and other tales he tells us that we should know aren't true (like him spending time with the tribe of a country that doesn't exist), etc. Additionally, Ishmael is at best a VERY minor character in the story, especially once he boards the Pequod.
So...why is he our narrator? Why do we even HAVE a narrator? It's an odd device that I can't quite decide if it makes sense or not.
I know many smart people consider this one of the greatest books in all of literature, and who am I to disagree? I feel certain that upon a re-read, the chapters that felt like clutter and noise to me would make so much more sense and help to build the fable and myth that surrounds the story we are being told ... but I also know that I'm never, ever, going to read this book again and I can only rate it on my initial pass.
It is indeed worth reading, but it's not exactly fun to do so.
And yet, the last 30 chapters or so, when we actually spend time on the Pequod with Captain Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb and yes, Ishmael ... these are really compelling and for sure a lot of that build up - both of understanding what the ship is like and also the consistent build up of dread and doom - works very, very well. I raced through this part of the book in one night, where the rest of the book took me almost a month.
Here's another question I can't quite shake - this story is told by the narrator who says to "Call me Ishmael." Throughout the book, there are numerous scenes we know Ishmael couldn't possibly have witnessed, and other tales he tells us that we should know aren't true (like him spending time with the tribe of a country that doesn't exist), etc. Additionally, Ishmael is at best a VERY minor character in the story, especially once he boards the Pequod.
So...why is he our narrator? Why do we even HAVE a narrator? It's an odd device that I can't quite decide if it makes sense or not.
I know many smart people consider this one of the greatest books in all of literature, and who am I to disagree? I feel certain that upon a re-read, the chapters that felt like clutter and noise to me would make so much more sense and help to build the fable and myth that surrounds the story we are being told ... but I also know that I'm never, ever, going to read this book again and I can only rate it on my initial pass.
It is indeed worth reading, but it's not exactly fun to do so.
It feels silly to attempt to review Moby Dick, so let's be brief say I concur with the general opinion that it's a masterpiece. It took me awhile to get to it, then it took me awhile to get through it, but it was worthwhile. I'm sure there are tons of things I missed appreciating the first time around, but that's okay. Ishmael's unexpected humor, Ahab's majestic raging, the Shakespearean staging, and a window into a strange, surprisingly fascinating world were enough. I still think whaling is abhorrent, but I'm hoping to get to one of the local whaling museums before this fascination wears off.
Brief Thoughts on Long Novels, entry #5
Of all the long novels I’ve read this year, Moby Dick has been the most thrilling and confounding. Confounding, because Melville bombards the reader with an entire encyclopedia’s worth of 19th-century whaling esotera, from the economics of the industry to every last detail in the known world about the science of cetology. Of all the classic long novels I’ve read this year, none has a lower rating on Goodreads. It equally inspires both love and hate more than a century after its publication. This novel ruined Herman Melville in his lifetime, selling so poorly he took a job as a customs official and didn’t publish another book–the slender Billy Budd–until shortly before his death decades later. Yes, all of this is true, AND YET, I count this book as one of the greatest American novels ever written. Why?
Shakespearian in its majesty, Hawthornian in its darkness, it’s one of the bravest, most fearless books I’ve ever read. And why has nobody ever told me before about Melville’s sense of humor and irony? “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian,” the narrator Ishmael opines early on, as he shares a bed with Queequeg, a heavily-tattooed pagan harpooner. (Homo-erotic undercurrents run through this book, leading some scholars to speculate about the author’s own unhappy marriage.) This book packs in madness and hilarity, and part of the madness has to do with the sheer damn poetry of it all. Melville had no college education–a whaling ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, he once said–but he had recently discovered Shakespeare and fallen in love with the plays and it shows on nearly every page. (Like King Lear, Ahab glooms with tragic hubris.) This is a book written by a man drunk on language, and the lyrical prose practically sings on the page.
Consider a passage like this, as one of the tragic characters, Pip the stowaway, jumps overboard and begins to drown: “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” Wow, I found myself writing in the margins many times. I loved this book. It’s profound, maddening, divisive, a poetic epic that is often read as a foreshadowing of the great tragedy of the Civil War. It's a novel, in short, that will endure for all time. I’ll leave you here with Ishmael’s presentiment: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
Of all the long novels I’ve read this year, Moby Dick has been the most thrilling and confounding. Confounding, because Melville bombards the reader with an entire encyclopedia’s worth of 19th-century whaling esotera, from the economics of the industry to every last detail in the known world about the science of cetology. Of all the classic long novels I’ve read this year, none has a lower rating on Goodreads. It equally inspires both love and hate more than a century after its publication. This novel ruined Herman Melville in his lifetime, selling so poorly he took a job as a customs official and didn’t publish another book–the slender Billy Budd–until shortly before his death decades later. Yes, all of this is true, AND YET, I count this book as one of the greatest American novels ever written. Why?
Shakespearian in its majesty, Hawthornian in its darkness, it’s one of the bravest, most fearless books I’ve ever read. And why has nobody ever told me before about Melville’s sense of humor and irony? “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian,” the narrator Ishmael opines early on, as he shares a bed with Queequeg, a heavily-tattooed pagan harpooner. (Homo-erotic undercurrents run through this book, leading some scholars to speculate about the author’s own unhappy marriage.) This book packs in madness and hilarity, and part of the madness has to do with the sheer damn poetry of it all. Melville had no college education–a whaling ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, he once said–but he had recently discovered Shakespeare and fallen in love with the plays and it shows on nearly every page. (Like King Lear, Ahab glooms with tragic hubris.) This is a book written by a man drunk on language, and the lyrical prose practically sings on the page.
Consider a passage like this, as one of the tragic characters, Pip the stowaway, jumps overboard and begins to drown: “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” Wow, I found myself writing in the margins many times. I loved this book. It’s profound, maddening, divisive, a poetic epic that is often read as a foreshadowing of the great tragedy of the Civil War. It's a novel, in short, that will endure for all time. I’ll leave you here with Ishmael’s presentiment: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
Wow. It’s so pointless to write review on classical masterpieces such as Moby Dick but I’m going to give it a shot just for myself, since I know I will forget those feelings I have about the book right now.
I feel ashamed that it is my first time reading this book, I feel ashamed that I didn’t know that Stabucks has it’s name because of a character in this book and hell I feel ashamed that I didn’t even know that Moby Dick is a whale.
Because now I understand the hype about this book in the american literature.
Three stars because I won’t read it again anytime soon (in 30 years probs).
But three stars because it truly has amazing literature styles and almost every chapter is different from the other. And the characters are written in very interesting way. It is not about the storyline but about the symbolism behind it. Not just the message well described in Simpsons but symbolism in Bible also. I felt really stupid while reading this book and most of the time I’ve spent googling the names and Biblical meanings - which I consider fun (no sarcasm here).
But … I’m feeling quite depressed now (maybe the weather?) and I’m used to reading quite depressing stories (Russian literature, yes, I’m looking at you, hey, don’t you dare to hide Young Werther!). But this was something else. The loneliness on the sea, the hopeless fight, the nonsense about revenge on an animal? I don’t know. I liked it just for the sake of words and genre but finish it was quite hard and the feelings after? No thanks.
I feel ashamed that it is my first time reading this book, I feel ashamed that I didn’t know that Stabucks has it’s name because of a character in this book and hell I feel ashamed that I didn’t even know that Moby Dick is a whale.
Because now I understand the hype about this book in the american literature.
Three stars because I won’t read it again anytime soon (in 30 years probs).
But three stars because it truly has amazing literature styles and almost every chapter is different from the other. And the characters are written in very interesting way. It is not about the storyline but about the symbolism behind it. Not just the message well described in Simpsons but symbolism in Bible also. I felt really stupid while reading this book and most of the time I’ve spent googling the names and Biblical meanings - which I consider fun (no sarcasm here).
But … I’m feeling quite depressed now (maybe the weather?) and I’m used to reading quite depressing stories (Russian literature, yes, I’m looking at you, hey, don’t you dare to hide Young Werther!). But this was something else. The loneliness on the sea, the hopeless fight, the nonsense about revenge on an animal? I don’t know. I liked it just for the sake of words and genre but finish it was quite hard and the feelings after? No thanks.