Also, it's an amazing audio book, you can really appreciate the beauty and musicality (and weirdness) of the language. Especially appreciate this version (the Big Read). https://soundcloud.com/moby-dick-big-read
Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#42Recently ran across this interesting guide to Moby-Dick: "The 100 Chapters of Moby Dick You Can Skip - And why you won’t want to" https://baos.pub/the-100-chapters-of-moby-dick-you-can-skip-... The point is that while most of the book is incredibly boring, that's a feature and not a bug.
In order to be excited some small part of you must be bored or as Melville explains it ... “To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a s…
That is a pretty elaborate excuse for the 100s of pages of whale taxonomy and physiology that interrupt the narrative.
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am skeptical of anyone who has read Moby Dick and not admitted how much of a slog it is.
Why? Surely you agree that different people have different tastes. I couldn't get through the first chapter of Infinite Jest, but I don't think people who say they love the book are being insincere. There are large numbers of people who would find the tech jobs that many people on this site enjoy to be incredibly tedious and boring.
Why cant a book be a slog and be loved? Being somewhat painful to get through is the price of admission for most classic works. Even the most diehard David Foster Wallace fan wouldn't challenge someone who said Infinite Jest was a slog to get through.
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#44The language of the reviews is quizzical. I caught myself thinking how high-brow language once was. Then, it dawned on me the sense of intentionality and craftsmanship displayed by each sentence. U up? Who dis? :emoji :emoji :emoji I'm not sure if I'm nostalgic, sad or just a little bit of, "get off my lawn."_
More effort was put into expressing meaning when people weren’t constantly stimulated. There’s still meaning today, but I can’t help but feel it’s shallow and unappreciated by reader and writer alike.
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#45For the lazy, there's a free Moby Dick audiobook on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg84olIrn-kb
Nice! It's 23 hours and 54 minutes long!
15 minutes a day listen and I'll be done in 100 days!
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Surely you agree that different people have different tastes. I couldn't get through the first chapter of Infinite Jest, but I don't think people who say they love the book are being insincere. There are large numbers of people who would find the tech jobs that many people on this site enjoy to be incredibly tedious and boring.
Because I read it and it was a slog. There are large portions of the book that are unrelated to the story and are painful to get through. But saying that makes you look dumb, whereas asserting how much you love it makes you look like a fabulously cultured and intelligent connoisseur of high literature. Whatever, though.
I didn't really care for the story itself that much, I was more fascinated by the whaling culture and the glimpse it provided of the views of that time and place, along with its fantastic writing. Which is why for me it wasn't a slog at all.
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#47"Without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous"
In the modern vernacular, "jumping the shark."
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#48Recently ran across this interesting guide to Moby-Dick: "The 100 Chapters of Moby Dick You Can Skip - And why you won’t want to" https://baos.pub/the-100-chapters-of-moby-dick-you-can-skip-... The point is that while most of the book is incredibly boring, that's a feature and not a bug.
And yet, this book, along with The Count of Monte Cristo, Grapes of Wrath, and quite a number of other tomes are assigned in high schools by teachers/school districts. Those educators think they are providing some kind of service by trying to force feed young people books that cannot really be understood in a meaningful way by the vast majority of people with ~15 years of life.
It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the rest of the novel.
I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long "classics".
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#49If anyone’s looking for a nice and libre ebook of Moby Dick , I produced one for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick I also put together a collection of Melville’s short fiction, which includes “Bartleby”: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/short-fict...
Thank you!
Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because I read it and it was a slog. There are large portions of the book that are unrelated to the story and are painful to get through. But saying that makes you look dumb, whereas asserting how much you love it makes you look like a fabulously cultured and intelligent connoisseur of high literature. Whatever, though.
I didn't really care for the story itself that much, I was more fascinated by the whaling culture and the glimpse it provided of the views of that time and place, along with its fantastic writing. Which is why for me it wasn't a slog at all.
If you're looking for something shorter and more readable about whaling, I'd recommend In the Heart of the Sea. The (nonfiction) story told there was used by Melville as inspiration for Moby Dick. Unlike Moby Dick, that was a book I could not put down, but my brain is also the size of a peanut.