I tried to read Moby Dick, I never was taught it in skool, so I started with the power moby thing online, an annotated version online for free.
I made it for the first few chapters through willpower, but it just kept going on about the motel the narrator was staying at, going into big detail about his bed arrangements. It also kept spending many words trying to set up the mood in the whaling port, which I thought would be better set for the ship itself.
In any case, I couldn’t take it anymore, and started skipping ahead, but then lost interest.
I just don’t get it. I see that the actual writing was very image-ful, so maybe that is why the book is considered good, but it just moved too slow. Why do I care about the narrator’s bedsheets again? Please help me.
I enjoyed it as a teenager. I had no stress at the time and thus had a much longer attention span. I tried to reread it last year, thought “how the hell could anyone read this crap?” and gave up after about 10 pages.
It’s my experience that sometimes it’s the stage of your life which makes a book more or less interesting to you. My first college degree was in English literature so I was never assigned Moby Dick and when I tried to read it in my twenties I just couldn’t hang in there. No relevance?
It’s on my kindle with a personal promise that I’ll have it read within a year or two. And I’m guessing I will understand its theme and how it relates to me better now than then.
Same thing with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Don’t remember how many times I revisited that short classic without finishing it. That one finally spoke to me in my fifties when I had had some time to experience what the world had to offer to a person who had lost his compass.
Watching “Appocalypse Now” and “Heart of Darkness” on film helped prepare me.
Your goal is admirable and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shelving a book that doesn’t speak to you. Keep reading and growing.
It’s certainly a great book, but it’s not really coherent. There are two main narratives: 1. Ahab chasing Moby Dick and 2. Ishmael and his friendship with Queequeg. #2 is started, then ignored; #1 gets lost because 80% of the book is a long nonfiction essay on life aboard a whaling ship. The essay is excellent and probably the best description on the sailors lived and of the whale hunts. Trouble is, it stops the #1 narrative for hundreds of pages at a time.
If you think of it as readying two books and part of another, it’s easier to understand.
I read it in eighth grade:eek: in some crazy ass advanced reading program. Didn’t get it. Tried to read it twice since and could never slog my way thru. Same thing happened with Ivanhoe. I must be dumb too.
I read it a few years ago. The only way I got through it was to start skipping paragraphs, and then whole chapters, when they didn’t appear relevant to finding the damn whale.
When I read it as a 16 year old, I made it enjoyable simply by constantly trying to imagine what it would have been like to read such an epic at the time it was written. It’s hard to see it now, but the leap in story telling between Moby Dick and the works of Austin or Dickens or Cooper is mind boggling. It’s like Sgt. Peppers being released at the time Bing Crosby was the gold standard of recorded music.
It’s just not as interesting now because so many novels have used it as a model and have naturally found ways to improve on it.
If you don’t like it, then just move on. Unless you were assigned the book in a class, you don’t have to finish it. There are lots of other books out there. You have your whole life to go back and try it again if you really want to. Liking or disliking a book proves nothing about your intelligence.
I’ve belonged to a book discussion group since the early 1980’s. About a quarter of the time I don’t like the book we’ve read, and I don’t have any problem with telling the group that I don’t like it. I don’t even mind saying it to the person who chose the book that month, since we know that we won’t all like every book that we read. Sometimes I only get a quarter of the way through the book and I willing say that I don’t like it. Liking or disliking a book is not a big deal.
I put it in a group of literature that includes Proust… beautiful, purposeless writing. Just let the words wash around you. If you don’t enjoy it, there’s no reason to read it.
Having said that, I love it. The first chapter is a spiritual experience for me.
I actually enjoyed Moby Dick and have even read it aloud to one of my kids - followed by The Old Man and the Sea for a contrast in style with similar themes. It says nothing about my intelligence, just my taste. OTOH your thoughts about Moby Dick is what I have felt about Primo Levi’s Periodic Table - I feel ashamed that I just simply cannot get into it and have picked it up and put it down many times. It seems like a book that I should be able to enjoy reading and I irrationally feel that it is a black mark on my smarts that it does not grab me. Honestly, I am not afraid I am dumb, my ego is solid enough to not be worried about that, but I am afraid that I am not smart enough to get why it is considered so good.
Melville was attempting to write a best seller, so the book is firmly in the tradition of the 19th century sentimental novel. That type of novel is long defunct and since no one nowadays has ever read one (I have), no one realizes that he was being extremely conventional for the time. The main thing lacking was a romance.
The main narrative thread is buried in the nonfiction essay. There’s one chapter about Ahab’s quest, the five more on the minutae of whaling. Then a chapter where Ahab asks a passing ship, “Have you seen the white whale?”. “Nope,” and we’re back to the minutae again.
The book was completely forgotten for years, until the sentimental novel was long dead and critics didn’t know where Melville was coming from. It was other authors who were advancing the novel at the time it came out, and the more astute critics passed over it because of its sentimental roots (which they were getting away from) while the more traditional critics didn’t like the way it strayed from the formula.
I listened to the Librivox version a couple of years ago and found, to my great surprise, that I thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s even some damned good humor to be found in it here and there. The nonfiction stuff was fascinating.
I read it, as required reading in a junior high school or high school English class. I found it really boring; I remember one whole chapter that described a rope used in whaling. As I remember, that description of the rope was the entire chapter. I think there may have been Biblical allusions that I missed (e.g., the narrator was named after the son of Abraham).
We also had to read Billy Budd, which was shorter and easier to get through. And we were convinced that there was a gay subtext to that novel, which our teacher denied. (It seemed obvious that the master who falsely accused Billy Budd was in love or lust with him.)
Smeghead, did you listen to the one narrated by Stewart Wills? I listened to the whole thing over a number of weeks during my daily commute.
Like you, I enjoyed it, found humor in it, and was fascinated by the information on whaling and seamanship.
As I recall, there was a section here and there that dragged, but overall I enjoyed it.
I can’t say whether or not I would have enjoyed reading it, since reading it and having it read to you by a talented narrator is a totally different experience.
I do find it interesting that most (but not all) of the respondents in this thread feel that it was a slog to read through it, while you and I listened to it and enjoyed it.
And most likely quite a bit more that you really didn’t care to know.
I think this is very true. I was only able to get through Ulysses when I was in my late thirties, and I became much more receptive to a lot of classic Russian literature once I hit my forties. I suppose I should give Moby Dick another try, and I should probably give War and Peace another shot as well.
I liked The Old Man and the Sea, and have been reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for a few months now. I also tried Moby Dick, couldn’t finish it. I’ve tried a lot of Russian lit, can finish it. Don’t much like British lit either. However I seem to like French lit from the same time period, go figure.
As has been said, unless it’s for class, if you don’t like the damn thing put it down.