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wordmaster 's review for:
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
"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.