Should I read Herman Melville?

I’ve spent quite a bit of my reading time this year on longer works. I’m considering reading some works by Melville. However, I’ve heard that they are boring and overrated.

Obviously, Moby Dick would be the place to start. I read excerpts in high school

I’ve heard nothing but scorn for* Billy Budd.*

Should I invest the time in Melville? Or, should I finish the works of Dickens/Hugo/Tolstoy/Dostoevsky which have been my reading for most of this year?

**Moby Dick ** is far from boring; at the very least, the long essays on whaling are fascinating from a historical standpoint.

I’d also recommend “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

Yes, you should definitely read Bartleby. Bartleby is one of the great, unforgettable characters in fiction; I had a professor who was fond of saying, “You don’t ‘read’ Bartleby; you ‘get infected with’ Bartleby.”

Some of Melville’s poems are wonderful as well; his Shiloh is one of my favorites.

But not from an accuracy standpoint. The long “essays” are folklore about “giant fish,” and they make up 97% of the book. And if by “far from boring” you mean excrutiatingly boring, then I agree. Here’s a digested version:

Call me Ishmael. Fish fishy fishy fish McFishy Fish O’Fishiness; the fish fishy fish fish fish, and fish the fish–or “fish”–of fish, fish, fish, fish, and fish. Indeed, fish fishy fishness, of fish, to fish the fish, and fishy fishing fish fish, fish, fishy fish, fishier fish, and fish. Even fish, if fish is to fish what fish is to fish, then fishy fish is fishier than fishy fishy fish fish. Unless of course fish is fish, in which case fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fishfish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish. We’re going to need a bigger boat. Glub, glub.

Me too. But if you have any last minute chores you need to do, like stabbing your gums with a fondue fork, you might want to get those out of the way before you turn to Moby Dick.

And by the way–

I started a “Nobel Prize” book group a few months ago, because I too wanted to read some books that had stood the test of time. Using the Nobel Prize list as a starting point, we’ve discovered some masterpieces:
*
Independent People* by Halldor Laxness
*Hunger *by Knut Hamsun
*The Dwarf *by Karl Lagerkvist
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Coming up:
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undsett
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
. . . and some non Nobels, but time tested, like Woolf, Joyce, Proust, etc.

I think people exaggerate about Moby-Dick’s boring parts. There’s a lot in it about life and people. It’s the type of book you can read over and over and read out of order and you can skim boring parts and still get a ton out of it. What more can you ask from a book? I think everyone should at least try it.

I read Moby Dick out of a sense of duty…I had a vague idea that I ought to be reading “improving” literature. I thought it was a bit tedious and flowery to be honest.

I then read White-jacket , which was also flowery but for some reason not as tedious. I pick up White-jacket quite often to re-read it but have not touched Moby Dick since the moment I put it down saying “Thank God that’s finished.”

Note that my two experiences mentioned above have not inclined me in the slightest to sample any more of Melville’s oeuvre. I’ve done my bit!

I don’t think I have the longest attention span in the world when it comes to literature, but I read Moby Dick for the first time a few years ago (probably in my late 30’s), and I loved it. I think whatever investment of attention you have to put into it pays off by the end. The only parts I found boring were a few philosophical ruminations by the narrator that you can easily skip without hurting your enjoyment of the book (assuming you’re not reading it for the philosophical ruminations).

If you have enough of an attention span for Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, you probably won’t have a problem with Moby Dick.

I’d love to see that as a headline: Nobel Prize Won By Laxness

PS I like Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Tolstoy, all the Brontes, Thackeray, Eliot and even bits of Hardy. I have read and enjoyed Silas Marner and Middlemarch. And I would rather drink paint than read Melville’s Typee again.

Definitely worth reading Moby Dick. Its one of those books whose characters and symbolism have entered the popular consciousness, everyone has heard of the white whale. If nothing else, its interesting to see what all the fuss is about, what’s so special about Melville’s writing that his story has attained mythic status?

Its also a good book to read if you’re American. Its a ‘great American novel’, probably one of the earlier examples, its always interesting to read the great books of your own country’s literary heritage.

Only if you want to.
I doubt you get Brownie points for doing so, but then again, it’s always a good idea to broaden yourself. If you think that reading Melville will do that-go for it.
Let us know how it goes-then I won’t have to read it.

:wink:

By all means, read Melville. Even Billy Budd, which I had to read in high school but learned to appreciate.

I second (or is it third or fourth by now) Bartleby the Scrivener . That one was enjoyable.

Billy Budd has a special place in my heart, as an essay on it got me a 5 on the AP English exam. I’m not saying I like it, exactly, but I’m glad I read it.

I’ve attempted Moby Dick no less than 4 or 5 times, and could just never get into it. I’ve heard it posited that Melville is a “guy’s” author, like Hemingway - that men like his writing, and “get” it, but women don’t.

FTR, you don’t get any “brownie points” for reading Literature as an adult. Read for enjoyment, not punishment. There’s lots of good stuff out there! :smiley:

Maybe, but I’d prefer not to.

The essays are mostly nonfiction descriptions of the process of whaling, written by someone who worked on a whaler (and who was a good writer). If you were researching any book about whaling, Moby Dick is the best original source out there.

Moby Dick I’m torn about. The stuff about mad captain ahab was very, very good. The stuff about the whaling industry was interesting, but the long biolgical essays about whales, whales and more whales was just boring after a while. It reminded me of what somebody once said about dumping a lot of information about something in a novel just because you did all this research.

That, is: Don’t.

Even if you do not read Bartleby, there is a recent film that is fairly faithful to the short story. I’d recomend both, but would go for the film since it features a theremin score.

The only book I found more tedious than Moby Dick was Anna Karenina. The Brothers Karamazov and Robinson Crusoe are close behind. That’s not to say I don’t like the classics; there’s plenty I enjoyed immensely.

What about some Steinbeck? Or, if you must stick with the transcendentalists, some Hawthorne?

Count me in among those who find it boring. I’ve read and quite enjoyed Ulysses and The Brothers K, but I had to force myself to finish Moby Dick. Rent the movie instead.