It just occurred to me, amusingly, that my "white whale" is...Moby-Dick. I've been trying to read Moby-Dick for most of my life, or at least I've been holding the idea in my mind that I will one day read it. And yet I never seem to be able to get through it. I own at least four editions of it. And have set out on that voyage at least that many times.
White whale, n.:
"An objective that is relentlessly or obsessively pursued but difficult to achieve" (Oxford Languages).
"A goal that you are determined to achieve, or something that you are determined to get, especially if this is very difficult" (Cambridge Dictionary).
"Something you obsess over to the point that it nearly or completely destroys you. An obsession that becomes your ultimate goal in life; one that your life now completely encircles and defines you" (Urban Dictionary).
"The potentially mythical object of an endless, life-long quest" (English Language Learners).
"The White Whale in Moby-Dick is possibly one of the greatest symbols in literature. When we talk about a character being used as a symbol, we mean that the character, in addition to performing a role within the plot, also represents an abstract idea or concept" (Study.com).
As a reader of non-fiction mostly, every year I try to read one great classic novel, for...balance, I guess. Trying to decide on this year's book. But this year I think one of my decisions should be to not read Moby-Dick, and indeed to never read Moby-Dick! I'm never going to read it anyway, so why continue to carry around the notion that I will? Out, damned spot.
Sometimes it's better to give up your dreams, am I right? I mean, Captain Ahab would have been better off if he had simply decided to give up on ever finding the great white whale. He could have spent the remainder of his days sitting by the fire in a little cottage in a quaint New England seaside town, with his bad leg comfortably resting on a stool, reading...a good book. Sometimes it's better to let things go.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
MARILYN NANCE: "In college, I read most of Moby-Dick in one long night only to find that the last 10 pages were missing from my used copy. Fortunately, I had been going to class and knew what happened. Try the audio book, Frank Muller is a wonderful reader (unfortunately passed)."
Geoff Wittig: "I also have too many editions of Moby-Dick. My favorite is a full-size facsimile of Andrew Hoyem's fabulous hand-printed Arion Press edition. The real thing recently sold at auction for $16,500 and it's widely regarded as the best fine printing done in America in the last 50 years. The Barry Moser engraved illustrations are fabulous. It's probably just me, but I find such a beautifully printed edition easier to get through, because I can enjoy the typopraphy and design in addition to the text itself. And, once you make your peace with Melville's period prose, he's a remarkably sly, droll writer. Bartleby the Scrivener is an astonishingly modern little gem of meta-fiction."
David Drake: "I was an English lit major in University and read Moby-Dick in an American Lit course. I very much enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I could get through it now. It's those exceptionally long sentences broken up with a crazy amount of commas. Our modern minds are used to sounds bites; we need to slow ourselves down to enter that 19th century mind-space. You get to the end of the sentence, and you've forgotten the beginning! It does give you a sense of the 19th century mind, as compared to the frantic pace of modern day. Now Ulysses by Joyce—there's one I didn't get through."
Dave Levingston: "I’m reading Ulysses. And by reading I mean it’s on my Kindle and every few months I read a couple pages. None of it makes any sense at all, so it really doesn’t matter. If you want something good to read in fiction there’s this guy named John Sandford whose books are so good I’ve read them all and wait impatiently for every new one he writes to be published. But maybe you shouldn’t take my recommendations. I loved Moby-Dick."
MikeR: "For me, it's The Federalist Papers. About 60 years, so far. I think the first two definitions appropriately describe my quest to convert an Epson printer from color to totally black-and-white, using carbon inks. I succeeded without having to use a harpoon, but that success was never assured."
Moose: "When I was 12–13, somewhere in there, I caught the mumps. Not a good plan, at that age: a.) Risk of sterility. Indications to date are that my middle-aged boys are my progeny. b.) PAINFUL! I killed time reading Moby-Dick. When the pain left, I left the book; don't expect to ever finish it. Coincidentally, I'm now on page 384 (of 857) of the recent novel Ahab's Wife."
Michel Hardy-Vallée: "It eluded me for a whale (ahem, I mean for a while...) until I bought the facsimile of the Arion edition by the UC Press. It's nothing about the size or complexity (I'm a card-carrying Joyce bro), but it's a question of maintaining attention. I can't commit to an ugly book. It's truly a masterpiece of typography and text-image integration. As a result, you feel like you're entering a well-ordered palace, and everything is in its place so that you can concentrate on the story. The design never competes with the text, and really enhances it."
To travel hopefully, is enough. I also have not read it. And I’ve read so much about it. Too soon for me to write off the possibility. I have read War and Peace when I was 18. I have been re-reading it for several years, interrupted by my son taking it over and racing through it, and now the second half is there for me to continue my slow delight in Tolstoy, some pages so rich that one or two are enough for one session. There’s a celebrated Australian novelist who I cannot read, not even all of the first page of any of his books. Be ruthless. Back to the whale: I happened to have had Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan on my shelves. In our referendum debate I had occasion to read it, and did so. A most marvelous book. “The universities are to the nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.” (That might have been Behemoth.) In response to his friend John Aubrey, noting how few books, perhaps half a dozen, he had about him in his chamber, recorded that Hobbes was won’t to say that had he read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.
Posted by: Richard G | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 03:43 PM
If you've tried but couldn't get through it, I think you've done all you can. You'e under no obligation.
Seriously, let it go. :)
Posted by: Robert Roaldi | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 03:47 PM
Why not enjoy watching the film version of the book. Maybe there is more than one film version.
The film version made an impression on me as a child, no idea what age I was, but I can still remember many of the scenes.
Posted by: Matt O’Brien | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 03:55 PM
I've made this suggestion before, but it's worth repeating. Try an audiobook. Play it in your car while you're going somewhere. I couldn't get past the first couple of pages of Ulysses in print, but the audiobook version was music.
Posted by: Bill Tyler | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 04:44 PM
I feel this way about Heart of Darkness by Conrad. Story about a boat ride that could have been condensed to a dozen or so pages.
Posted by: Mel | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 04:47 PM
You've mentioned your preference for non-fiction reading a number of times before. I've tried it both ways. Fiction and non-fiction.
Fiction is a hell of a lot more fun.
Posted by: Kirk | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 04:50 PM
I managed to plow my way through Moby-Dick last year. Certainly not life-changing, but worth the effort, at least for me. If you want to read a classic about a big fish, try Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Shorter than Moby-Dick, but similarly metaphorical.
Posted by: Mark B | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 04:56 PM
Well you could come to New Bedford and listen to it be read live. The Whaling Museum does a Mobley Dick Marathon the first weekend of every year.
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/moby-dick-marathon-2025/
I think they stream it live as well.
Posted by: dpj | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 05:09 PM
Ditto on this wretched book.
Life is short.
Suffering is not mandatory.
The agonising descriptions of horrible things are not the "stuff of life".
Why can't the Governor of Florida burn all the Moby Dick books instead.
It has the word Dick in the title. Surely that qualifies it?
Posted by: Kye Wood | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 05:23 PM
I don't read Moby Dick for the story, as much as for the poetry.
It is mostly poetic, but as a trial, look at Chapter C11 (A Bower in the Arsacides), at about the bottom of the second page: paragraph beginning with "It was a wonderous sight."
In fact with the very first paragraph in Chapter I: beginning with "Call me Ishmael." Melville seems (to me) to be putting us on notice that it is to be read as poetry.
And almost every sentence in the book profits from saying it to yourself (hearing it in your "minds ear" so to speak).
Posted by: Daniel Speyer | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 05:24 PM
Recently I picked up a copy of Moby Dick and read a ways into it. I'm a much better reader than I was when I was younger, more patient. The writing struck me as fairly easy to get through, with a good amount of humor. However, I still set it down after a few days, and picked up something else. Not sure why. Maybe I'll pick it up again. It's good writing, sometimes approaching Shakespearean.
Posted by: John Krumm | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 05:27 PM
At least read the "Chowder" chapter.
Posted by: Mike Mundy | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 05:32 PM
And in fact the second paragraph in Chapter I is proof of my argument.
Posted by: Daniel Speyer | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 05:33 PM
I've read it, as an adult. I am puzzled why it was/is assigned to so many high school students. Yes, it is a remarkable book - but it also contains many, many pages about ... whales.
Due in large part to when it was written, some of that whale information presented is not even close to scientifically accurate. (The detail of life at sea on a whale ship, OTOH, is very, very accurate, based on other 'age of sail' researchers).
You might be better served in reading Annie Duke's "Quit: The power of knowing when to walk away".
Since the target is classic novels, I think there are many that are more worthy of your time than Moby Dick. A few that leap to mind: Huck Finn, Catch-22, Kafka's "The Trial", even "Bleak House" by Chuck Dickens - highly underrated. If you've read (or tried!) all of those, I'll be glad to list more!
Morgan Housel gives some great advice about reading which I'll paraphrase (badly). Be generous in the number and kinds of books you start, but be very, very selective in which ones you read beyond the first chapter.
Years ago, I would have considered such advice anathema. Now, I think he's right, and I've been trying to follow that pattern in my own reading.
As we become "men of a certain age", our time is too precious to give authors who can't write a good first chapter the benefit of the doubt.
Posted by: Severian | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 06:21 PM
Moby Dick is certainly a difficult read. I’ve been working my way through its ponderous language for a couple of years now and Ahab has only just appeared on deck. I think this will take as long as the whaling journey it depicts.
The last book I found as difficult to read was about the history of geological mapping. I sat down to read that one long weekend and managed to get all the way through ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in breaks that same weekend. They were just so contrasting reads - one was like wading through molasses and the other like gliding on ice - despite the non-fiction work being the one that interested me most.
Posted by: ChrisC | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 06:45 PM
You might have better success listening to MOBY-DICK. You can listen while driving, doing chores, taking a walk, lying in the hammock.
Twenty-five years ago I listened to the marvelous Frank Muller reading MOBY-DICK on Books on Tape. He was a master at differentiating characters by varying his voice, cadence, and accent.
Now, of course, you can download the audiobook to your cellphone. Below is the URL for Muller's reading. You can hear a one-minute sample before deciding to buy it.
For a book this long, I recommend buying to borrowing (by download) from the library. At 21 hours in length, you might not have time to finish the book in the two-week period your library permits.
https://www.audible.com/pd/Moby-Dick-Audiobook/B002V8L3RI
Posted by: Gary Merken | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 07:10 PM
Hi Mike,
If you have Amazon Prime you can listen to Moby Dick for free, here is the link.
https://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-AmazonClassics-Herman-Melville-ebook/dp/B072KN8SYF
Posted by: A.B. Cole | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 07:45 PM
You should read Moby Dick because it's possibly the best novel ever written. If you don't read Moby Dick, and if you haven't read it, try "The Once and Future King." You will be charmed.
Posted by: John Camp | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 08:14 PM
Try In the Heart of the Sea. Book and Movie. The true story. I'm also a history (non-fiction) reader. More interesting to me than inventions.
Posted by: Rick in CO | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 08:30 PM
I read Moby Dick in college but not for a class. I spent a month in a Trappist Monastery one summer. It was the only book I had with me. That worked!
Posted by: Aaron | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 08:37 PM
I too have a white whale, though I am currently recuperating on extended shore leave. My last trip out resulted in exhaustion, a degree of madness, and very nearly self destruction.
Having seen my white whale, life appeared to have another meaning, a distinct purpose. I found a passion and enthusiasm for something that I had not felt before, but for which I had no self restraint. It seemed great things could be achieved with this single mindedness, and the great consequences became things of no apparent concern. Life seemed to make more sense with such a purpose, I felt alive. I crossed a fine line between that separates an idea from an obsession. People on the distant shore waved with urgency and tried to return me to my previous life, but I would not have it. Only after being swept upon some rocks did I find my way back.
I now know of a new weakness in myself - that against all logic and without means of restraint, I will pursue something with a degree of passion and enthusiasm greater than I can resist. Once in the boat, I can’t be brought back. It appears from one perspective to be the way to get great things done, then I turn it in my hand and from the other side it appears to be madness.
From where I stand now on dry land, resuming my previous existence, I look around and it feels as though life if devoid of purpose, full of dull routine and dull happenings. Chasing a whale is madness, but so is passing ones days without meaning. I feel a little sad for those who have never chased a whale, but also a little envious.
Maybe the whale is a life fully lived, or maybe it’s a folly and my destruction. Its the later of the two, I tell myself, with both bravery and cowardliness. “Not everyone is cut out to be a whaler”, I tell myself. “Leave these lives to those who were born to it”. Keep being yourself, and live your life, or your obsession will be the death of you.
So I must not set out, I tell myself again and again, all the while standing on the shore looking into the distance. I know the whale is still out there, but it feels the pursuit can’t be done by me in halves, or with moderation. I don’t need to hold this forever, only until either the whale or myself are gone.
Some will understand, others won’t.
Posted by: David | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 09:00 PM
Ethel, my 103 year old mother in law is legally blind due to macular degeneration. Even in this condition she can read with the help of a special magnifier.
It consists of a horizontal easel and a video camera and a flat screen monitor. She places the book below the camera and blows up the book one word at a time.
She spends her mornings reading scripture and her afternoons reading for pleasure.
Last year she polished off Moby Dick. She said she thought she ought to read it while she had time.
I am in awe of what she reads. Two years ago she read the Wolf Hall trilogy, 2000 pages and highly recommended . She just passed me her copy of The Remains of The Day.
She does all of this one word at a time, amazing if you ask me.
By the way if you want a book as challenging as Moby Dick but a lot more fun may I recommend The Succession by George Garrett. You will have to brush up on Tudor history or you will in get lost in a hurry but the book is amazing. It left my head spinning several times. Loved every page.
Posted by: Mike Plews | Sunday, 02 June 2024 at 11:37 PM
Moby Dick was surprisingly modern, and one of the nerdiest books I've ever read, full of digressions into the practice, history, science and lore of whales and whaling and even maritime law. I ate it up. Those digressions were a welcome break from the thrills and dread of the main story, and also part of the eerie rhythms of the work. Like E.M. Forster said, it's "an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry [or an especially literary and obsessed blog?]. But as soon as we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important."
It might be more pleasant to have the book read to you by a parade of celebrities, here: https://www.mobydickbigread.com
I don't think it would be as good as reading it yourself, but it might be a way in. You can listen to the first hundred chapters or so, while, say, preparing dinner, or doing laundry and decide if it's worth continuing. (I don't know if the celebrity readings include the footnotes, which are both entertaining and essential, IMO.)
There are also live readings all over the country. Moby Dick is more experience than book, and company can be comforting.
Posted by: robert e | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 12:33 AM
Holy crap!
David's comment that begins -
I too have a white whale, though I am currently recuperating on extended shore leave...
If that's original (I'm assuming it is), what an incredible piece of writing. Thank you.
Posted by: Kye Wood | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 01:49 AM
Not a book but two films. I love old films. I have tried and tried and tried to watch these two films at least a dozen times each. But I cannot. My eyes just close as if by magic.
Casablanca. Of all the films in all the world it had to be this one. Maybe one day I will play it again, again.
Gone with the wind. This has to be the most boring film in the universe. Dislikable characters, dislikable everything. Just, no.
Recommended black and white film, because of the photography which is very natural and doesn't get in the way of the story and because it is a very good film. "How green was my valley" 1941. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033729/mediaviewer/rm2835894272/
Posted by: Stephen | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 01:54 AM
Life is too short to struggle with a book. I once pegged a Booker prize winner into the far corner of the hotel room I was staying in. Sheer frustration.
I listened to Moby Dick om audio and still didn't fully enjoy it.
I read 2-3 books per week and listen to another one. I have found I will listen to a book I would not read, and vice versa
Posted by: Thomas Mc Cann | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 04:09 AM
On the contrary Mel, Heart of Darkness is probably one of the greatest novels ever written. In it Conrad, in a few short pages turns the whole European idea of colonization inside out to suggest that the darkness is within all of us. He completely dismantles the so called European "civilizing mission" and this was written at the high point of imperial power. In short, a masterpiece. There are many writers who perhaps ought to take a look at Conrad before they inflict their 500 plus pages of turgid prose on us!
Posted by: Nick Davis | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 05:18 AM
I studied English Literature to GCE A-Level when I was at 6th form. One of the set books was Austen's "Emma". I just could not bear to read it age 17. I finally finished it a year after I retired. I consider my younger self to have been of sound mind, even though it was a set book... Why torture yourself.
Posted by: Dave Millier | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 06:10 AM
I echo Bill Tyler: a couple years ago I listened to Moby Dick on Audible while truckin cross country. I expected it to be a slog but it wasn’t at all. Not for one second did I desire to put it down.
A side benefit of listening to books is that it teaches and trains your ears the art of listening. You know how to listen you say? You probably don’t but just think you do.
Posted by: Jeff1000 | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 06:56 AM
I have an Aspirational Bookshelf. On it are books that will require an unusual commitment of time and effort, but which I do intend to get to. It does not contain books I will probably never read, or those that I'll polish off in the normal course of things. It could be a graveyard of good intentions, but I've actually retired a fair many, including Boswell's Life of Johnson, Plutarch's Lives, The Faerie Queene, even Don Quijote in Spanish. Every person has a different set of motivations and likes/dislikes; do what works for you.
Posted by: Alan Whiting | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 08:52 AM
I do not find Moby Dick to be difficult to read.
A fanatic with charisma is, helas, something that happens again and again. And the sheer nonsense of something like hatred against an innocent animal that did nothing than defending itself against whale hunters, thus acting in legitimate self defense, is a good description of a certain state of human mind.
I found the film adaptation by John Huston with Gregory Peck quite impressive, with the protagonist Captain Ahab overshadowing the first half of the movie without even being shown, as his first appearance is quite late in the movie. A bit like Puccini's Tosca, where the villain protagonist, Baron Scarpia, appears for the first time only at the end of Act I.
Moby Dick certainly influenced another movie, "Run silent, run deep", with Clark Gable in the role of a submarine commander in fanatical search for the Japanese destroyer that once sank his ship.
Posted by: Anton Wilhelm Stolzing | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 09:56 AM
You might try Loren Eiseley. I have read and reread his collection of books.
At least check him out....
Posted by: Skip Davis | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 09:57 AM
I’ve read it and enjoyed it. But I think you need an edition with a good apparatus of explanatory notes. I used the Penguin English Library version from the 1970s.
Posted by: Chris Bertram | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 10:53 AM
So you would prefer not to? Melville has you covered.
https://www.amazon.com/Would-Prefer-Not-Essential-Stories/dp/1782277463
I think it's a problem of being told you should read something. I have that problem with Catcher In The Rye.
I'm perpetually in the middle of The Confidence Man. Sometimes Melville is a little more modern than you expect.
As for the movies, they all miss the point of the book and get caught up in the whale stuff.
Posted by: hugh crawford | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 11:06 AM
Read this in college in an upper-division course for English majors. Prof told us the (large) number of sections to skip.
There are those who say they are not to be skipped, because of the language, or the insights into the mind of the narrator, or for this or that reason. I disagree.
Melville could certainly write very well, but he doesn't seem to have been that great of a self-editor. Or perhaps he got paid by the word or had a page quota to fill. He seemed to have lacked an economy of style- not every description has to be a flowery metaphor. Not every concrete color or shape or noun has to have an undercurrent of layers of symbolism.
And he was certainly capable of producing shorter works, such as Typee or Billy Budd.
I agree with those who think M-D is one of the great works of American literature, but I also agree it's one of the most boring.
Posted by: ronin | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 01:51 PM
May I suggest you invest eight minutes and listen to https://www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141429619/why-read-moby-dick-a-passionate-defense-of-the-american-bible. I heard this when it was first broadcast and it motivated me to read Moby Dick and Philbrick's book "Why Read Moby-Dick?"
Posted by: Joel Bartlett | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 02:26 PM
"He could have spent the remainder of his days sitting by the fire in a little cottage in a quaint New England seaside town, with his bad leg comfortably resting on a stool, reading...a good book"
He could have, but that's not who he was.
"I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and onely declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming."
John Donne, letter to Sir Henry Goodere, Sept. 1608
Posted by: Sean | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 03:56 PM
You can sneak up on it and start with "Bartleby the Scrivener.", a Melville short story.
Posted by: KeithB | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 04:11 PM
Moby-Dick is a puzzle. The title is hyphenated but the whale's moniker is not. Only Melville knows why.
I'm reading it now in the 3rd Norton Critical Edition; its explanatory notes are sometimes useful. For the first time I was able to get past the third chapter, now to chapter 48 (where at last some riveting action springs to life).
Before he settled down to married life my grandfather Axel was a windjammer sailor, shipwrecked off the Kermadecs in 1902 when he was only seventeen. I was born in 1941. Thanks to Melville I finally know how Axel's seafaring life was lived.
Posted by: Allan Ostling | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 05:24 PM
Moby Dick is like the bible, full of story, digressions, and doubling back on itself. Like the bible, it has some beautiful language and phrases that you will remember for the rest of your life.
Posted by: HBernstein | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 05:34 PM
I encourage you to first read Nathaniel Philbrick’s short (120pgs) book “Why Read Moby Dick”. All by itself, it’s a great read. Even if you never go on to Moby Dick, it will give you a deep appreciation of Melville’s masterpiece.
Jim
Posted by: Jim Newton | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 06:58 PM
Moby Dick was the first book I read after switching jobs to one where I was commuting on public transit. Yes, it has some long digressions, such as more than you ever needed to know about whaling. But some great scenes.
Posted by: John Shriver | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 07:42 PM
I can truthfully say I read Moby Dick, enjoyed it, and did not find it an onerous struggle to read to completion. One caveat, I had a movie job at the time, traveling through some of its same Polynesian locations. Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji. Might be that it is best enjoyed with a touch of malaria and a stubborn heat rash. The edition I found was 4” thick and had some nice woodcuts to illustrate.
Posted by: Eric Peterson | Monday, 03 June 2024 at 08:10 PM
Some books are best not consumed page by page in a single binge sitting but picked at in little bits out of order. Moby Dick is one of them. It's effectively comprised of a series of short stories, each of which stand up more or less alone. Read a chapter here and a chapter there - no particular order is necessary to appreciate the great writing and the structure (it reads as a post-modern novel but was published in 1851(!)), laugh at the many, snide jokes, puns and asides. Pay close attention to the hilarious homo-erotic overtones that run through the entire book, some of which are easy to miss if you're not watching out .... hey - it's about a man with an ivory leg chasing a giant white Sperm whale, what do you expect?
Posted by: Bear. | Tuesday, 04 June 2024 at 05:12 AM
Since you aren't going to read it, jump ahead to the chapter titled "The Symphony" and read a couple of paragraphs. As a writer, I think you'll appreciate how brilliant the writing is in that chapter.
Posted by: Patrick Wahl | Tuesday, 04 June 2024 at 08:31 AM
I'll add my voice to the consensus that seems to be developing: Moby Dick is a wonderful book. Ulysses is the white whale. Ulysses is horrible, horrible, interminable, pointless. I've tried to read it three times, I think (once via audiobook, which even that did not "take"), and I got fairly deep into it one of those times, but it is just not worth the considerable effort.
Moby Dick, though, isn't what I thought it would be at all. I was prejudiced by the writing standards of the mid-1800s, expecting the long-winded, dry, overwrought prose of, say, James Fenimore Cooper (possibly unfair, since he was born in the eighteenth century and wrote around the time Melville was being birthed). Instead, when I finally read Moby Dick, I found the writing so unconventional, sprightly, playful and engaging that I could barely put it down. I don't think it's hyperbole to call it the greatest American novel of its time, because I think it broke free of the literary cage at the time in a way that I'm not sure anyone else did.
Sorry to hear it has been repelling your forays. If the prose doesn't "click" with you, then it may be a fruitless endeavor. I know I go through phases when I want to read different styles. If you do this, maybe work up to Melville by reading some other slightly difficult, thoughtful prose books beforehand.
Posted by: Andrew L | Tuesday, 04 June 2024 at 12:31 PM
A couple years ago, a friend of mine was selected to be "Writer of the Month" at Arrowhead, Melville's residence in Pittsfield, MA. From his desk at Arrowhead, Melville looked out across the fields to Mt. Greylock, which, to him, supposedly looked like a whale.
My friend was going to write a column about his Residence for the local paper (The Berkshire Eagle) and wanted a picture to go with it. He thought it would be fun to include a goldfish bowl on the desk, to suggest the real inspiration for the book.
I had never been to Arrowhead and wasn't sure of the set up, but thought it would be pretty funny if we could pull it off. I imagined a fish, backlit from the famous window, translucent and golden, shining brightly on Melville's desk. So I agreed to meet him one afternoon at Arrowhead for the photo shoot.
He showed up with an Easton Press edition of Moby Dick and a goldfish bowl full of water. I asked where the goldfish was and he held the bowl to the light, where I saw a brownish goldfish about 1 1/2 inches long lying on the bottom of the bowl.
"It'll be fine," he said.
We climbed the stairs to Melville's office and I unpacked my gear and set it up while my friend carefully placed the book and bowl on the desk.
I took many frames, trying to balance the exposure between the bright scenery through the window and the shadowy desk in the office. I also worried about the depth of field, wanting to make sure Mt. Greylock was reasonably in focus. I hoped the fish would swim up through the middle of the bowl and show itself, but it proved to be completely uninterested and remained an invisible lump on the bottom. I asked if it was alive. After a while, we gave up on it.
The photo was published along with his column a while later. To my knowledge, no one ever mentioned the goldfish bowl.
(Mike -- if you're interested I can send you the photo. I don't have it hosted online, so I can't imbed a link. Let me know)
Posted by: Rick Popham | Tuesday, 04 June 2024 at 03:12 PM
For me, Moby-Dick is the funniest of the Books You're S'posed To Read. Ishmael and Queequeg's meet-cute in chapters 3 and 4 is something I go back and reread when I'm feeling low. Even the very serious parts are often cartoonishly over-the-top.
Posted by: Ed G. | Wednesday, 05 June 2024 at 11:28 AM