Trollheart

Oh god I tried to read Moby Dick once but it was so BORING! I hadn't even a clue what was going on. Left it after about 100 pages. So tedious. And not a whale in sight!

Your comment though reminds me of something my brother used to say disparagingly about Americans:

"You don't understand? What's wrong boy: don't you speak American?"

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

SGR

I could see how you might get that impression from Moby Dick upon a cursory attempt, but if you stick with it, you'll find one of the most fascinating and hilarious novels in the English language. I read it fully maybe 3 or 4 years ago. I learned from my grandparents that this novel used to be mandatory reading in school which astounds me, just because it's not necessarily an easy book to read. The language is verbose and flowery, the chapters take diversions into the mundane (classification of whales for example, and not even the non-fictitious kind), but yet, it's still a riveting novel.

I'll take Moby Dick any day over the complete snorefests that are "The Great Gatsby" or "The Scarlett Letter". Joyce's "Ulysses" or Lowry's "Under the Volcano" are much more challenging novels than "Moby Dick" when all is said and done.

TheBig3

wtf is going on in this thread. Melville and Fitzgerald are two of America's best. On what grounds do you dislike either?

Trollheart

Well for me as I already said Moby Dick was incredibly boring. I wanted to read it but it was too much of a slog. I was totally lost. Mind you, I later saw a TV version and I was kind of glad I didn't; there's some serious ****ing cruelty to whales in that book. I'm not disparaging him, just as I wouldn't disparage any other writer I couldn't get into, but he ain't for me.

And now the thread becomes a discussion on literature. The magic of the internet at work.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

SGR

Because The Great Gatsby was the Twilight of the roarin' twenties. It's like a precursor to Hemingway's debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. A tale filled with vapid and vacuous characters who you couldn't give a damn about whether they lived or died (and I like most of Hemingway's other material). In fact, in some respects, you often hoped for their death so that you didn't have to hear from them anymore and their empty and pitiful recounts of misbegotten misplacement any longer. And unfortunately, Bret Easton Ellis carried on the tradition of vapid and empty character shells with his debut novel Less than Zero which featured enough unsympathetic drug addicts and junkies to make Hubert Selby Jr.s' charcters from A Requiem for a Dream blush with envy.

Edit: Per Fitzgerald, I'm not criticizing him as a writer, just that one novel, I've never read any of his other works to be clear.

Well ...yeah. It's a novel about whaling - about killing whales. For their resources. Kinda hard to get that without cruelty. Unless there's a humane way to kill whales back then. Despite being outlawed now, I mean, it is a big part of history.

jwb

I liked the sun also rises

The protagonist was hilarious... just a hopeless cuck with ambigously mutilated genitals from the war who is following some boyish british broad around while she gets railed by bull fighters. I'll take that over some old cuban c*nt trying to catch a big fish any day.

But I agree with TH about Moby Dick.

Psy-Fi

Druthers sounds like it should be the name of a British butler.

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Janszoon

With a name like Druthers it has to be good.

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Psy-Fi

12 year old single malt scotch?

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Trollheart

This is true of me too. I'm not, as I said, disparaging Melville's work (did he do The Sea Wolf too? Man that was a horrible story - again, only saw it on TV) just that the one book I tried to read from him was too boring. Can't get past that. Start off with a writer and be bored by their work, you're unlikely to go further, even if they are a celebrated one. I mean, I loved Les Miserables but had some serious issues with all the, to me, rather unnecessary and overblown stuff about the Napoleonic Wars.
I realise that. I just, for some reason, thought there was more distance, like they harpooned them from the ship or something. it's so down and dirty and visceral. Anyway I'm completely against whale hunting and any form of animal cruelty as per my post about hunting, so yeah, I knew what I was getting in to, but I didn't expect it to be so, well, raw and in your face.

"Druthers! I say man, bring forth that novel from the chap who writes about whales. By golly, I think I'll give it another go, dont'cha know!"

"Moby Dick, sir?"

"No, Druthers: it's a family problem, and I've asked you not to draw attention to it!"

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018