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quote:Within the pages of this book are contained some of the most beautiful words ever written in the English language...This volume of work has become part of our heritage and, translated into all the tongues of the world, has become for each nationality, for each culture, part of their heritage, too; a cornerstone of literature and drama...like the music of Bach or the painting of Leonardo, have transcended the pettiness of time and place and have become part of those eternal things that speak to all men at all times. The above quote is from the preface of the works of William Shakespeare, but I think it should apply to Moby Dick. Moby Dick is about a sailor called Ishmael who ends up on a whaling ship captained by Captain Ahab, who's blinded by his lust for Dick. I imagine most people will be familiar with the basic plot of the book as it has become integrated into modern culture. You might say someone is 'as mad as a ship full of Ahabs' if they act a certain way for example, or that something is a 'white whale' if it resembles an albino cetacean. It was my prior knowledge of the plot that made me imagine the book to be a certain way, although after reading it I can say my expectations were nowhere near what the book is actually like. Context  In the mid 19th century we used whale oil in lamps and as an industrial lubricant. The most prized of all oils was found in the dome space of the Sperm Whale in the form of spermaceti, a kind of waxy gloop which seems to serve no purpose other than to be good at making candles from. Roughly 50,000 whales were killed annually until the invention of electricity, and most sea faring nations gained +2 gpt from whaling (England, America, France, Netherlands). Herman Melville happened to be born at a time in which whaling was not only a profitable business but also mostly ethical. After spending some time himself aboard various vessels and writing love poems he embarked on writing the greatest whaling novel that could ever be. Due to an overly complex printing fiasco, there were various versions of the book, some missing the epilogue, others being heavily edited, and became panned by critics. But as everyone knows, criticism in the 19th century was entirely wrong. Nowadays Moby Dick is rightfully hailed as the relative post-modern Old Testament, going on to influence Matthew Barney, Gene Roddenberry, Ernest Hemingway and a whole host of pop culture immortals. Analysis  There are many themes to be explored between the covers of Moby Dick. The unabridged version weighs in at a whopping 600 or so pages, try holding that in one hand as you ride the subway! Running parallel to the plot of nautical revenge are dozens of chapters that cover philosophy, history, comedy, art criticism, geography, slavery, god, biology and so on. The book doesn't stick to any particular genre or style, I don't think I've read a book quite like it. The closest I can think of would be Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon, though as different from them as they are from each other. I haven't read much literature written before the 20th century, but I found Moby Dick to be relatively accessible for the most part. Although the narrator is Ishmael, the reader becomes more like Ahab, chasing the whale through the pages until approaching the apocalyptic end. In a way. There are several underlying themes that run throughout the book. Is the Whale a metaphor for God, Satan or eternity? Is the book a meditation on the failings of revenge or a saga proclaiming the glory of standing for what you believe no matter the consequence? The way in which man dominates and is dominated by nature? And what's with all the homo-eroticism? I think every reader will take something different away from the book, which makes it more or less perfect in my opinion. Watch the trailer here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT-eVxb6kzI
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Sep 29, 2014 08:20
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Moby Dick is the best book ever written. I've read it twice, second time without skipping the whaling parts. I guess some people are forced to read it in high school and hate it forever because of that, it's a shame. (And no wonder, I didn't read anything but crappy fantasy in high school either and hated every mandatory classic, refusing to read most of them).
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Sep 30, 2014 16:58
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English classes in school made me and many others hate poetry, and that is a great sin.
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Sep 30, 2014 17:38
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I sort of enjoyed it when I read it (about five years ago) and I even bought a new edition in anticipation of re-reading it, but the interminable whaling sections have put me off ever picking it up again. Life is too short. There's a million books I'd rather read and enjoy rather than grind through Moby Dick again.
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Sep 30, 2014 18:23
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Moby Dick is a bit of a slog because Herman Melville is a good descriptive & mechanical writer but a tad bit blase when it comes to everything else such as characters, plot, and style. It's like reading the sermon of a rather long-winded priest from the middle of the 19th century. I'm not going to bash him or his writing but he was very much a product of his time in the worst way.Baron Bifford posted:English classes in school made me and many others hate poetry, and that is a great sin. Not to derail, but I'd argue that what makes teenagers hate "classical" literature is more in the way it is taught and what is taught. Moby Dick is, IMO, more of a college-level text. Same with the Scarlet Letter. Books like "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Great Gatsby", "Fahrenheit 451", ect. are all rich, well-written works that are easily comprehended and enjoyed by students without frustrating them. If you want a kid to hate reading forever, give them Molls Flander in freshman English and assign a hundred pages in a week (yes, some of my colleagues have actually done this). Captain Mog fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 21:52
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justcola posted:It was my prior knowledge of the plot that made me imagine the book to be a certain way, although after reading it I can say my expectations were nowhere near what the book is actually like. From its reputation I expected Moby Dick to be a complete slog, but I really enjoyed it. The whole thing was much more approachable and interesting than I had expected. Also: 
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Oct 2, 2014 02:40
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LLCoolJD posted:From its reputation I expected Moby Dick to be a complete slog, but I really enjoyed it. The whole thing was much more approachable and interesting than I had expected. Also:
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Oct 2, 2014 03:21
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I just don't get this book. I tried to read it recently. People go on about how serious and beautiful it is, but to me it seemed like a super wordy and comical account of a dude and his adventures with a savage native with whom he was having a bromance. Dude and savage eat lots of chowder. Dude and his savage are forced to sleep in the same bed and hilarity ensues. I gave up when I realized I had just read 10 pages about the color white.
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Oct 2, 2014 13:42
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The Dregs posted:I just don't get this book. I tried to read it recently. People go on about how serious and beautiful it is, but to me it seemed like a super wordy and comical account of a dude and his adventures with a savage native with whom he was having a bromance. Dude and savage eat lots of chowder. Dude and his savage are forced to sleep in the same bed and hilarity ensues.
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Oct 2, 2014 13:53
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Captain Mog posted:Not to derail, but I'd argue that what makes teenagers hate "classical" literature is more in the way it is taught and what is taught. Moby Dick is, IMO, more of a college-level text. Same with the Scarlet Letter. Books like "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Great Gatsby", "Fahrenheit 451", ect. are all rich, well-written works that are easily comprehended and enjoyed by students without frustrating them. If you want a kid to hate reading forever, give them Molls Flander in freshman English and assign a hundred pages in a week (yes, some of my colleagues have actually done this).
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Oct 2, 2014 14:59
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The Dregs posted:I just don't get this book. I tried to read it recently. People go on about how serious and beautiful it is, but to me it seemed like a super wordy and comical account of a dude and his adventures with a savage native with whom he was having a bromance. Dude and savage eat lots of chowder. Dude and his savage are forced to sleep in the same bed and hilarity ensues. That's the only part I've read. I really enjoyed it -- I love eighteenth century nautical bromance! -- but I always get distracted by something else and forget to return to the book. quote:While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
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Oct 2, 2014 15:13
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spermaceti https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8j818w-qE
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Oct 2, 2014 16:52
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I love the whaling parts. They are kind of weird and scientifically wrong, it's great. High school teachers just end up cutting it to pieces because it's just not really something that lends itself to being taught in a high school classroom. I don't know how anyone decided that very many teenagers were going to get anything out of it. Even in a college class it's more the kind of work you'd structure an entire class around. I got it in high school as just another text in a regular non honors English class, and don't think a word of it registered.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:35
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Otto von Ruthless posted:I love the whaling parts. They are kind of weird and scientifically wrong, it's great.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:40
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Baron Bifford posted:Melville was a whaler so this surprises me. This is a pretty good explanation. I find it fascinating particularly because it's a glimpse into how science as we think of it wasn't quite fully formed yet - still more entangled with philosophy, less authoritative places to refer to. You get to look at something that has almost, but not entirely clicked into place.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:50
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Surprised this hasn't been posted yet: The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World I am currently reading this, the Norton Critical version. I just got to where they spotted the white whale. I'm really ready to be done with it. The prose can be great but I, for one, found myself skimming over most of the whaling parts. Starting to get pretty good now though as it's getting more focused.
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Oct 2, 2014 21:38
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Otto von Ruthless posted:High school teachers just end up cutting it to pieces because it's just not really something that lends itself to being taught in a high school classroom. I don't know how anyone decided that very many teenagers were going to get anything out of it. Even in a college class it's more the kind of work you'd structure an entire class around. I got it in high school as just another text in a regular non honors English class, and don't think a word of it registered. I'm just surprised anybody's still attempting to teach it in high school. Was it an abridged version or the full thing? I was an English major in college, and nobody at either of the two universities I attended assigned Moby-Dick anymore, for the reason you mentioned--it comes pretty close to a semester-long text. Bartleby, Benito Cereno, and maybe Billy Budd have all surpassed it even at the college level, I think, just to make sure students are exposed to Melville without having to subject them to the length of Moby-Dick. Which is unfortunate, because Moby-Dick is so worth reading even despite some parts being such a slog, but I'm not sure how you could teach it appropriately without devoting at least a couple months to it and ideally more.
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Oct 5, 2014 00:25
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aslan posted:I'm just surprised anybody's still attempting to teach it in high school. Was it an abridged version or the full thing? I'm sure it was some kind of abridgement but I don't really remember, it was more than a decade ago. Mostly I remember just staring at the pages. It was assigned by an otherwise excellent teacher who played a big role in getting me interested in 'real' books. I think he may have just been overly optimistic about his students.
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Oct 5, 2014 01:41
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I was never forced to read this in high school, and ended up reading it on my own in a break I took between High School and College. I had always imagined it to be this sort of stuffy, dense, difficult-to-read nineteenth century novel about a subject (whaling) that I supposed I had little to no interest in. So I was fairly shocked when I picked it up, started reading it, and had read it twice through a week later. I just thought it was absolutely stunning. It's still one of my favorite english-language novels ever written. I actually find the beginning, with the seemingly out-of-place homoeroticic content between Queequeg and Ishmael to be fascinating, and it absolutely confounded my expectations as to what I expected the novel to be like. That particular chapter - "The Counterpane" if I remember correctly, where Ishmael wakes up to find a tatooed savage clutching him like a lover - is what convinced me to stick through the entire thing no matter what, because the entire chapter was both exquisitely written and completely bizarre.
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Oct 5, 2014 09:52
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This book holds one of my favourite chapters ever written in English. I can't recall which chapter it was, but it's the one written in a similar style as "Ithacha" in Ulysses (or rather, the other way around). Just like the OP I thought I knew exactly what the novel was all about before I started reading it. "yeah, yeah, an old stuffy sailor is chasing a white whale around the globe to find purpose and revenge, right?". I think not actually realising what kind of novel I was getting into, or getting into it with the wrong expectation, made me appreciate it a whole lot more. I need to reread this book at some point.
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Oct 5, 2014 12:39
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I think the essay portions of the book are what make it stand out. The way in which Melville approaches a, mostly, scientific topic with a mixture of philosophy and misunderstanding give the whole thing a sort of cosmic flavour, and they also punctuate the book nicely, with the first section being a more comic homoerotic adventure with essays on boating, upon seeing Moby Dick the chapters are more based on whale imagery before plunging into the actual hunting and slaughter of whales and the final section is an examination into the whale itself. There is a certain kind of rhythm to the book, and whilst not being especially challenging to read I think it's easy to make the mistake that Ahab finding Moby Dick is what the book is about, when the actual meat of it is an author trying to deal with his relationships to whales in an existential manner. Perhaps. I wouldn't say there's any one superior way of reading the book or conclusions that everyone would agree with, but as a book I don't think I've read anything quite like it. Once I'd finished I was more stunned that a book like that could be written in the middle of the 19th century, and that every reference I'd heard previously totally waxed over what makes the book stand out so much for me.
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Oct 7, 2014 23:20
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OK, this thread inspired me to reattempt this book and it really is just hilarious once you get your ear used to the narrator's humor.
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Nov 6, 2014 19:39
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Same. I am at page 200 now and really liking it. It's also a lot easier to read than I expected, but maybe thats because I've read Gravity's Rainbow already.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:35
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aslan posted:I'm just surprised anybody's still attempting to teach it in high school. Was it an abridged version or the full thing? One of the best classes I ever took was an entire summer semester on Moby-Dick. Even after three months, it felt like we had barely scratched the surface. I posted a thread about it at the time, and some good discussion followed. You can read it here, if you've got archives: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3180617&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Dear God, I wrote a lot of words in that thread. I'm shaking my head, but also kinda wanting to read the book again.
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Nov 7, 2014 08:49
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Yesterday was a damp and drizzly November [day], so I picked up my copy and am like 100 pages into it instead of reading any of the new books I just got. I don't know what it is about this book that just drags me in over and over again. I forgot I also picked up the awesome version with all the Rockwell Kent illustrations.
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Nov 7, 2014 15:36
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WAY TO GO WAMPA!! posted:Yesterday was a damp and drizzly November [day], so I picked up my copy and am like 100 pages into it instead of reading any of the new books I just got. I don't know what it is about this book that just drags me in over and over again. Yes! Kent's illustrations are awesome. Something about his blocky silhouettes and stark lines really fits Moby Dick better than any of the elaborate thin lined styles usually used to depict the final scenes on the covers and frontspieces. The latter are beautiful, sure, but for interior illustrations, Kent is fantastic.
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Nov 7, 2014 18:20
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I've just been reading the Gutenberg edition. Is there a particular hardcover edition that people recommend?
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Nov 7, 2014 21:31
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Spoilers Below posted:Yes! Kent's illustrations are awesome. Something about his blocky silhouettes and stark lines really fits Moby Dick better than any of the elaborate thin lined styles usually used to depict the final scenes on the covers and frontspieces. The latter are beautiful, sure, but for interior illustrations, Kent is fantastic. Gilbert Wilson's "Insanity Series" is one of my favorite pieces of MD art, even though I've only ever seen crappy scans of the paintings: http://www.nku.edu/~moby/fletch2-2.html He was apparently apprenticed to Kent for a while.
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Nov 7, 2014 22:13
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I've just been reading the Gutenberg edition. Is there a particular hardcover edition that people recommend? Or if you want something too fancy to actually carry around, there's Easton Press.
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Nov 7, 2014 23:46
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WoG posted:Well, it's not translated, so the gutenberg edition will be the same content, but for something pretty, it's part of the new Penguin Drop Caps series. Looking over the thread it seems like what I'm looking for is 1) Complete and uncut text, whatever the most authoritative and "best" version is. 2) Thoroughly annotated. 3) Rockwell Kent illustrations, which really do look awesome from what I can see on Google. At this point if I'm buying a physical copy of a book that's in the public domain, I want annotations and/or illustrations, otherwise I'll just read it on Kindle.
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Nov 9, 2014 01:51
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Chalk me up as another "couldn't get through it on first attempt, couple years later it's mah favourite" folks. This book just has that way. It doesn't have annotations, and I'm not sure what cut it is, but the Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition has the most beautiful cover for my money. It's the fourth one down: http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.ca/2009/08/back-to-good-stuff.html
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Nov 9, 2014 02:30
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justcola posted:The way in which man dominates and is dominated by nature? This was it for me. The book starts out describing the whale in Biblical terms and making it seem like this great, incomprehensible force, and then spends the next 500 pages systematically picking it apart piece by piece so that when they finally confront the whale you honestly think they can kill it. It is, after all, just a whale and they caught plenty of whales. Then Moby Dick loving obliterates them and Ishmael is like "I told you the whale was some Biblical monster, dummy" and you're like "oh poo poo, I got got." I imagine the abridged version is a much different experience for people. Irish Joe fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 02:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Looking over the thread it seems like what I'm looking for is The Modern Library version has Rockwell Kent's illustrations, but no annotations. It's also in paperback.
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Nov 9, 2014 03:58
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Sir John Feelgood posted:The Norton Critical Edition has the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry version of the text and is thoroughly annotated, but it's not illustrated. D'oh. It looks like there was a push to do a kickstarter for exactly what I'd like . . . . and it failed. http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/herman-melvilles-moby-dick-annotated-on-kickstarter_b64465 =(
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Nov 9, 2014 04:30
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I first read Moby Dick when I was 13. It was a great sea adventure with encyclopedic bits thrown in. I reread it when I was 16. It talked about a rebellion against nature's order. Then I read it when I was 20, and it was all about obsession, certainty and how it's shattered by time. Last time so far I read it when I was 23 and what I remeber most is how magical and surreal it makes otherwise completely ordinary situations look. Guess what I'm saying is that it's a great book and I need to read it again, hopefully to catch humor. By the way - my copy doesn't have annotations and I recently acquired a Kindle; is there a good annotated version of it somewhere online?
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Nov 9, 2014 13:45
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Irish Joe posted:This was it for me. The book starts out describing the whale in Biblical terms and making it seem like this great, incomprehensible force, and then spends the next 500 pages systematically picking it apart piece by piece so that when they finally confront the whale you honestly think they can kill it. It is, after all, just a whale and they caught plenty of whales. Then Moby Dick loving obliterates them and Ishmael is like "I told you the whale was some Biblical monster, dummy" and you're like "oh poo poo, I got got." Honestly even after whaling was explained to me I didn't understand how it was possible.
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Nov 9, 2014 15:00
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I just finished The Whiteness of the Whale and I don't get what people complain about. That was really good and interesting.
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Nov 9, 2014 15:20
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anilEhilated posted:
http://www.powermobydick.com/
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Nov 9, 2014 15:21
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Right, I guess the reader-capable versions you still have to pay for even though the book is public domain. Thanks anyway.
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Nov 9, 2014 18:33
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Peel posted:Honestly even after whaling was explained to me I didn't understand how it was possible. Its been a decade since I made my way through Moby Dick, but my understanding is that they spear the fish, attach weights to it to wear it down, follow it around for a few days, and then kill it once its run out of steam.
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Nov 9, 2014 19:46
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