This is the thread where J.D. tries to read "Moby-Dick."

The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last.

(spoiler warning)

http://40.media.tumblr.com/ae04c2d18a74f4a64a175766467580f1/tumblr_n346diPnTV1rm9irpo2_1280.jpg

I read the novel in a week, didn't find it intimidating; it felt like I was listening to an old aunt sharing stories using her peculiar quirks and speech patterns.

intimidating before commencement, while still looming.

it's a breeze tho yes, part wisecracking naturalism, part "pomo" (tho premo) info-deluge, part insane fourth-wall-breaking comic book where people soliloquize madly ("science! curse thee, thou vain toy!"), part paradise lost. there are no better books.

otm.

always a little miffed when people act as if this book consists long boring passages about whaling interspersed amongst a more traditional seafaring adventure. the whole thing is wild and funny and not a single page drags for me.

this book is nearly impossible to read. today i had lunch with a girl who claimed someone in her family tree was on the whaleship that inspired melville. (apparently there is a movie) i asked her if she ever read the book herself, and she said she thought so, a long time a go. i was like...if you had finished this friggin' book you would know!~

always a little miffed when people act as if this book consists long boring passages about whaling interspersed amongst a more traditional seafaring adventure. the whole thing is wild and funny and not a single page drags for me.

That = me on the ILB thread, will rectify.

why "nearly impossible"?

One thing that struck me about reading excerpts from it (via twitter) was how Shakesperian it is. And seems to pull off that language with some ease too. Or at least it makes me like Shakespeare a lot more than I do.

re: "nearly impossible"

It's dense. I don't have much affinity with Shakespeare or the 'history of literature." Or the ocean. Would love to read Ishmael go on about the woods though.

or go through a couple more Queequegs

I loved this novel until the part where they actually struck off to sea and then it got really boring

the diverting if comparatively behind-its-time gravity's rainbow is an ilx totem while this thread is 80% "long, boring": lieutenant huxley, your fascination with the vulgar twentieth century seems to be affecting your better judgement

I found gravity's rainbow legitimately extremely difficult to read. moby dick is not even in the same league in terms of difficulty. though the idea that "it's a breeze" to read or whatever rings false to me, though maybe your reading habits might include reading naturalist tracts from the 19th Century and the reams of cetology will be like sweet manna to you.

never cared much for pynchon

Ha. Gravity's Rainbow was another stop I took on my book tour. And I did say "a breeze" relative to, like, Ulysses.

when i finally did go back and give the book another shot in 2010 i actually found the "habits of whales" chapters to be pretty enjoyable. melville filters all the information through his kooky narrator voice, so a lot of those chapters are just him doing his weird autodidactic musings on some musty old book he (i assume) was taking a glance at while he wrote.

i started a poll here a long time ago about books like moby dick, ulysses, proust, et al -- i forget what won, but it was primarily a way to motivate myself to read all those books (it didn't work too well).

his weird autodidactic musings on some musty old book he (i assume) was taking a glance at while he wrote.

he loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality

Love Moby-Dick, have read it somewhere between four and six times; have never made it through Gravity's Rainbow.

i'm only like 200 pages into Moby Dick but i'm completely in love with it. you really can draw a line from this to something like pynchon. comic book action/adventure, mysticism, obscure taxonomy/science/history, blended language, fluid pov, all butting up against and mixing with each other in strange and surprising ways. so excited for the rest of it.

YUP

always a little miffed when people act as if this book consists long boring passages about whaling interspersed amongst a more traditional seafaring adventure. the whole thing is wild and funny and not a single page drags for me.

had someone articulate this complaint to me the other day and i was just like, jeez, the whaling chapters are not only extremely entertaining, they tend to necessarily explain the action of the previous chapter

anyway i have a moby-dick tattoo. this is the best book ever

"The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics."

i guess it goes on a little longer later, but the first Cetology chapter was like 14 pages and it was really interesting. was expecting it to be a dead dry 50 pages or something.

This is the first fat 19th century book I really love (almost all of my faves tend to be small-ish: Lermontov, Nerval, von Kleist, Lenz). Maybe Portrait of a Lady or The Devils.

The Moby Dick twitter account is wonderful. As well as comments on here and Melville's The Confidence Man it was the thing that actually made me try it. Need to read Bartleby next.

"First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?"#RejectionLetterQuote for Moby Dick, a novel by Herman Melville. pic.twitter.com/WZBVCrb2RE

— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) October 3, 2018

^^^this is the edition i have -- wit the rockwell kent illustrations -- and it's lovely

been working my way through this, they finally mentioned the whale and i'm 400 iPad pages in

the book is awesome tho

the "whiteness of the whale" chapter was...quite something.

hit my stopping point last night at the end of chapter 31, tonight we get CETOLOGY.

If y'all want fun, read Clarel.