Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick • Hacker News Board

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#51

Post by yuuu » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

ericmcer wrote: post #43

allturtles wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

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.

Thanks for putting this more eloquently than I could. This is an important point that I didn't state. There are passages in Moby Dick that are indeed beautiful, but the first thing I think of when I hear Moby Dick is how painful it is to read.

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#52

Post by DantesKite » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #18

If 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 for your contributions. Standard Ebooks is one of my favorite websites and a delight to people in creative design and typography.

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#53

Post by scop » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

blululu wrote: post #15

“To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and…

I am also reading it for the first time right now. I am absolutely blown away by it. It has an energy to it that is difficult to convey, as if it was written by a mad man all in one sitting.

There are sentences or paragraphs that go on and and on I find myself thinking "Ok Melville went a little too far here" and then, by golly, he brings it all together in a flourish.

The language is simultaneously as descriptive as anything I've read, yet curiously opaque. It's perhaps best described by a passage from a novel of similar linguistic stature, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:

> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#54

Post by jrumbut » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #34

> The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. I have to agree with this. The book certainly has its merits, but story isn't one of them...which is sad because I think there could be something interesting in the vendetta story, but 90% of it was spent discussing whaling (which is interesting on its own).

This was approximately what I thought the first time I read it, except I didn't find the vendetta story interesting.

On subsequent reads (and especially listening to it read aloud and as an audiobook), my opinion turned on its head. The structure reflects whaling, with weeks of discussion about ropes and navigation punctuated by relatively brief periods of excitement.

Ahab and the whale are left vague because that makes them grander in the imagination than they could possibly be when thoroughly described. The whale is just out there looking for squid, it's the people on the boat that have made it out to be something different.

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#55

Post by yissp » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #26

billfruit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And minutiae about court cases, legal precedent of the era. Similar with Count of Monte Cristo as well, the details of the Mediterranean smuggling trade it goes into is simply amazing.

20000 Leagues Under the Sea also came to mind.

Ha, so many pages of exhaustively cataloguing aquatic species.

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#56

Post by billfruit » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #26

billfruit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And minutiae about court cases, legal precedent of the era. Similar with Count of Monte Cristo as well, the details of the Mediterranean smuggling trade it goes into is simply amazing.

20000 Leagues Under the Sea also came to mind.

Perhaps, but I do remember it being smaller than Les Miserables, Monte Cristo etc which are massive, almost 1500+ pages of material in each of them.

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#57

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

One past thread:

The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209719 - Sept 2017 (29 comments)

The Man Who Edited Melville (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736842 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)

Herman Melville at Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547911 - July 2019 (2 comments)

What Happened to the Book Herman Melville Wrote After ‘Moby-Dick’? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983571 - May 2018 (16 comments)

Why Does Moby-Dick Sometimes Have a Hyphen? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12939407 - Nov 2016 (19 comments)

I Used Google BigQuery to Map the Locations Mentioned in Herman Melville's Books - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11573730 - April 2016 (2 comments)

White whale in the big smoke: How the geography of London inspired Moby-Dick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728471 - Dec 2015 (2 comments)

Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of Wall Street - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10449293 - Oct 2015 (9 comments)

Before Moby-Dick, There Was “Two Years Before the Mast” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877987 - July 2015 (12 comments)

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#58

Post by lbebber » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

yuuu wrote: post #50

lbebber wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Awesome, thanks for the recommendation

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#59

Post by skyechurch » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

jimbler wrote: post #41

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

I had read Moby Dick before, and found it enjoyable, but listening to the William Hootkins audio version opened it up for me in a way my reading of the text never did (eg it's actually a very funny book, which entirely escaped my notice). Whether this is because I was an inattentive reader, or that 170 years ago people had fewer demands on their attention, I don't know.

Re: Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

#60

Post by gbjw » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #18

If 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 so much! Moby-Dick is my favourite novel --- appreciate the effort.