Thank you for that, I'm definitely going to check out both.
Since I checked out your profile to see what kind of person does these beautiful things for free...can you tell me why it is so hard to order online from ikea?
I got most of the way through an answer about IKEA, but I’m not sure realistically how much I can say publicly. But it’s fairly obvious (my opinion, I’m not speaking for my employer here) at least that the pandemic has hit the logistics of IKEA in the US more than it has in other markets.
“To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes.”
Could not agree more 170 years later. My girlfriend and I are currently reading the book aloud to each other before bed and almost every page is a master work of the English language.
I am also reading it for the first time right now. I am absolutely blown away by it. It has an energy to it that is difficult to convey, as if it was written by a mad man all in one sitting.
There are sentences or paragraphs that go on and and on I find myself thinking "Ok Melville went a little too far here" and then, by golly, he brings it all together in a flourish.
The language is simultaneously as descriptive as anything I've read, yet curiously opaque. It's perhaps best described by a passage from a novel of similar linguistic stature, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
McCarthy lists Moby-Dick as his favorite book [1]. The otherwise-impenetrable sentence "The Dipper stove." from the first page of Blood Meridian will be immediately understandable to anyone familiar with early 19th century whaling expeditions.
“otherwise-impenetrable” is a great way of characterizing McCarthy and Melville. Often I am left mystified at what I just read, but have sensed something of great weight and gravity…I suppose that’s life, eh?
I don't know what Melville thought of Shakespeare, but we can trace a stylistic line through Meridian, Moby Dick, Macbeth.
All three have a mad project of egotistic ambition, sooth-sayers of doom, and great helpings of gore along the way to the catastrophe foretold. Sooth-sayers are of course, always correct, whether they appear as a trio of witches, world-weary Parsee, or a decrepit "disordered Mennonite".
One of the things that I think is strange about Moby Dick is the shift in language.
SPOILERS:
So most of the book is just a beautiful snapshot of a very odd slice of life in the early 1800s, namely whalers. However, not just any whaler, the book is very clear on this, sperm whalers. Also, not just any sperm whalers, nantucketers. Even though the majority of the crew is international, they are on a nantucket ship, with a nantucket captain, and are thus honorary nantucketers. Ok, so anyway, most of the book is just about learning what their life is like, and it's unusual in the way because Melville literally had to teach us everything about this unusual slice of life, to get the rest. My point though is throughout all of this, which is like 90% of the book, the language and tone is somewhat plain and often times light hearted. There are a few moments where its serious, like when there's the electrical storm and Ahab fixes the compass, or when they're towards the end of their journey and they see another ship of nantucketers who weren't driven to kill the whale, but just to make money and they're just rolling in the dough, throwing everything overboard just to make more room for more sperm oil.
MORE SPOILERS:
Any way, then in the end is really where we see a huge dramatic shift in language. For one thing it becomes *hard*, even as a native speaker the sentence structure, word choice, and ideas being conveyed are just harder. Basically what's happening this whole time is Ahab is trying to kill the whale, is failing to do so, and we're sort of consummating what sort of felt inevitable the whole time but from Ahab's perspective. I think in this sense, Moby DIck is really unique because it's almost two stories: there's all the fun stuff about learning about whaling, and then there's the artful part of it. The change is very dramatic.
Any way, I think it's a great book, but it's very different than say Typee, where the whole book stays in the same tone as the first part of Moby Dick that I described. The last 50 or so pages of Moby Dick, are borderline psychedelic.
> The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition.
I have to agree with this. The book certainly has its merits, but story isn't one of them...which is sad because I think there could be something interesting in the vendetta story, but 90% of it was spent discussing whaling (which is interesting on its own).
This was approximately what I thought the first time I read it, except I didn't find the vendetta story interesting.
On subsequent reads (and especially listening to it read aloud and as an audiobook), my opinion turned on its head. The structure reflects whaling, with weeks of discussion about ropes and navigation punctuated by relatively brief periods of excitement.
Ahab and the whale are left vague because that makes them grander in the imagination than they could possibly be when thoroughly described. The whale is just out there looking for squid, it's the people on the boat that have made it out to be something different.
And yet, this book, along with The Count of Monte Cristo, Grapes of Wrath, and quite a number of other tomes are assigned in high schools by teachers/school districts. Those educators think they are providing some kind of service by trying to force feed young people books that cannot really be understood in a meaningful way by the vast majority of people with ~15 years of life.
It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the rest of the novel.
I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long "classics".
> HS literature cirriculum having zero relatability to students so they're unable to comprehend why the books are "great"
I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before. Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as well-rounded individuals.
You're lumping in Steinbeck with Shakespeare and Moby-Dick? His topics are much more relevant to what is going on for many students today and the language is much less dated.
In my specific case, it was due to going to one of the better-off suburban school districts. Even though it was obvious that the characters were stuck in a Dickensean world at the intellectual level, none of us had the real-world experience to get what it's like to be a migrant farm worker at the gut level or even to suddenly have perspective of our less-affluent classmates.
My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.
The local schools have gotten a lot more into contemporary novels and I'm all for it. I see occasional grumblings on the FB groups but no one has managed to change the curriculum.
I love classics and every time I read one there's a moment when I think to myself "I'm so glad no one is going to make me write an essay on this." I don't have to try to pull out the major themes, I don't have to discuss about the character's motivations, I don't have to consider the novel in the context of what was going on in the writer's life time. I can just let it wash over me, I can just enjoy it.
It's a miserable and joy-killing way to approach reading. Even as I look back to the books I read in High School I don't think any every became my favorites. The Great Gatsby is a fine book but when I look back on it I remember all the sections where we had to point out 'symbolism'. What a drag.
Of the many possible "classics" to throw at teenagers I feel Moby Dick is far from the worst option. At least it has some humor to it, and on one layer it is just an adventure at sea; its not just pure pathos. And compared to many others its relatively short novel, especially if you skip some of the non-essential whaling chapters.
I imagine the goal was to expose students to something they'd otherwise perhaps never read. My school favored shorter stuff like the Old Man and the Sea... which I did love regardless, but I guess can have the same problem of not connecting with younger readers.
In order to be excited some small part of you must be bored or as Melville explains it ...
“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
I'm a non native english speaker trying to read this book, sort of gave it up around (i think) half to read other books in the waiting list. Most of the interludes are not that engaging to me (whale classification chapter comes to mind), which is a pity since I enjoyed the actual narrative.
Yeah, a few people have mentioned these as low points. But I really liked them.
Reminds me of some of the stuff I enjoy in Umberto Eco's historical novels where he dives deep into some historical worldview, often one we now know is wrong, though I think in this case Melville was relating the current state of the art of his age, but both do so quite poetically.
Some of the cod-Shakespearean bits were a bit more of a drag for me. Something for everyone maybe.
The language of the reviews is quizzical. I caught myself thinking how high-brow language once was. Then, it dawned on me the sense of intentionality and craftsmanship displayed by each sentence.
U up? Who dis? :emoji :emoji :emoji
I'm not sure if I'm nostalgic, sad or just a little bit of, "get off my lawn."_
You're comparing highbrow literature reviews in leading magazines to short instant messages, which are a significantly different medium designed to be read by one or two people once, and then thrown away. Your best comparison is telegram style[0], which is not dissimilar to today's texts—complete with its own slang and shorthand. Nobody's writing "u up" in the New Yorker.
TELEGRAPHY CHANGED LANGUAGE STOP CHARGING BY WORD STOP FLOURISHES TOO COSTLY STOP
That era was just starting by 1850, but showed in some language, especially in newspapers, and to an extent Mark Twain.
Hemmingway remains the exemplar though.
I strongly suspect that the ornate language also served trust and signalling purposes. With faster communications, that could be indicated by other means (returning texts immediately rather than long exhortations of faith, fearing the correct gods, and infinite gratitude to one's superiors, should one have any). This turns up in business correspondence, and the history of business writing and messaging as communications increased in speed and bandwidth are interesting. A small handful of companies (the Souther Pacific Railroad, DuPont Chemical, General Electric) had an absolutely outsized impact on standards of correspondence and recordkeeping, particularly from about 1880 -- 1910 or so. Even standardisation of fields on memos, most of which were later reflected in RFC 822 email message headers, date to this time, and were aimed at improving ease of reference and filing.
More effort was put into expressing meaning when people weren’t constantly stimulated. There’s still meaning today, but I can’t help but feel it’s shallow and unappreciated by reader and writer alike.
If you think they didn't have slang in the 19th century then you are mistaken. You can't compare academic writing to slang and pretend society has devolved. We live in a time where people who would be locked out of the publication process for "reasons" can now write books. Where literacy is the highest ever. Where more books get published than ever. The incredible progress in publishing should be praised, not disingenuously mocked.
> We live in a time where people who would be locked out of the publication process for "reasons" can now write books.
People could write unpublished books back then just as well, and people can be locked out of the publication process today. The difference is that "reasons" were given by a person and today you're locked out by an Algorithm that doesn't even tell you why.
Highbrow term for the ability to switch language usage as required by communication context: kairos.
> James Kinneavy is largely credited with reintroducing the importance of kairos into the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and, thus, the composition classroom. According to Kinneavy, kairos is “the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved”
A brilliant book, possibly my favourite of all the books I have read, which is a lot, and certainly one that I have enjoyed re-reading time and again. Tragic that it wasn't more widely appreciated in Melville's lifetime. A must read.
Yes, it is if every sentence in it is a thoughtfully crafted poetic fragment.
And many of the chapters essentially nonfiction, a sort of encyclopaedia of Whales and Whaling.
"Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!"
Rudyard Kipling - Remembered now for children’s books but also wrote some amazing novels and poetry for adults. He has written some pretty trippy stuff too. I remember a poem about all the structural parts of a ship talking to each other in a storm and another short story about an engineer that’s a sort of fever dream mixed with a monsoon flood at the bridge he’s building.
A lot of literature from that period paid attention to the the rhythm and flow of the sentences, if you read any of it aloud it rolls off the tongue compared to modern writing.
I must be stupid because I read that line you quoted and I have no idea what it means. If I need to study and deliberately parse every sentence, and think about archaic idioms or word meanings, it's just too much effort. Give me a Tom Clancy or John Gresham novel.
I don't know about the other books off the top of my head, but Count of Monte Cristo and Dumas' other works were published as serials in a newspaper, where I'm pretty sure he was paid per word. Such a system really encourages going into detail with things that are not exactly relevant to the plot :)
Fun to see this on HN. What an incredibly strange, amazing and beautiful book. Ambition as wide as the ocean. I think both Ishmael and Mellville were nuts. I'm attempting to finish it right now (again). I've tried multiple times to get all the way through. I've joked that Moby Dick is actually my Moby Dick.
Why? Surely you agree that different people have different tastes. I couldn't get through the first chapter of Infinite Jest, but I don't think people who say they love the book are being insincere. There are large numbers of people who would find the tech jobs that many people on this site enjoy to be incredibly tedious and boring.
Why cant a book be a slog and be loved? Being somewhat painful to get through is the price of admission for most classic works. Even the most diehard David Foster Wallace fan wouldn't challenge someone who said Infinite Jest was a slog to get through.
Thanks for putting this more eloquently than I could. This is an important point that I didn't state. There are passages in Moby Dick that are indeed beautiful, but the first thing I think of when I hear Moby Dick is how painful it is to read.
Because I read it and it was a slog. There are large portions of the book that are unrelated to the story and are painful to get through. But saying that makes you look dumb, whereas asserting how much you love it makes you look like a fabulously cultured and intelligent connoisseur of high literature. Whatever, though.
I think you should consider the possibility that other people sincerely like this book, even the portions you found tedious, and aren't just pretending in order to show off their culture and intelligence. What does 'zabzonk' have to gain from proving his culture and intelligence to 'yuuu' and 'allturtles'?
I didn't really care for the story itself that much, I was more fascinated by the whaling culture and the glimpse it provided of the views of that time and place, along with its fantastic writing. Which is why for me it wasn't a slog at all.
If you're looking for something shorter and more readable about whaling, I'd recommend In the Heart of the Sea. The (nonfiction) story told there was used by Melville as inspiration for Moby Dick. Unlike Moby Dick, that was a book I could not put down, but my brain is also the size of a peanut.
I think a lot of it comes down to how you read it.
I usually read a book in a couple of sittings. This favors lighter fare, with copious excitement to keep one engaged.
I could never do this with Moby Dick. But with a 10-30 page reading per day, you hear about some interesting thing: perhaps mostly whaling and sailing, perhaps advancing the plot and characters. It's not enough to sustain an excited big read, but it's certainly enough to make you wonder about what you'll read next.
The chapters average 3-4 pages long. I think this is a hint that it's intended to be consumed in morsels.
It's not a slog. On the contrary, it is perhaps the ideal book for reading while sitting on the loo, or whilst having a bath. The chapters are mostly short, and typically cover different aspects of characters, plot, and other stuff, and are easy to read. Once you have read it through once to get an idea of the plot, you can just dip into at random, or re-read favourite bits. I used to keep my paperback copy in the bathroom.
Whether a book is enjoyable or not depends at least as much on who reads the book as on the book.
When I was a child, I have read Moby Dick and I have enjoyed every part of it very much, including the so-called boring parts about the history of whaling and so on.
At that age most of what was described in the book were new things for me, so they were interesting.
Half a century later, I would never have patience to read any similar book, as it is extremely unlikely that any such book could contain anything that I have not read before.
I agree that it’s a brilliant book, but it’s also a very strange one. Those reviews suggest to me that some of the earliest readers did in fact appreciate both aspects of it.
Also, it's an amazing audio book, you can really appreciate the beauty and musicality (and weirdness) of the language. Especially appreciate this version (the Big Read). https://soundcloud.com/moby-dick-big-read
I had read Moby Dick before, and found it enjoyable, but listening to the William Hootkins audio version opened it up for me in a way my reading of the text never did (eg it's actually a very funny book, which entirely escaped my notice). Whether this is because I was an inattentive reader, or that 170 years ago people had fewer demands on their attention, I don't know.
There's a whaling museum in Lahaina on Maui, which has lots of good stuff. I happened to visit it one time while a book group was reading Moby Dick and it made a great impression.
I agree, the museum is great. I visited there shortly after I read Moby Dick and that was where I learned about the marathon. But I was there in August and not January so missed it as well. Sadly I live in the Midwest. Will have to try to plan when there isn’t a horrible snow storm to make it there in the future.
My wife visited the museum on Nantucket and said that was also a very enjoyable experience.
Moby Dick is a fascinating book, and I think part of what makes it work so well is the alternating, aside-heavy style that the second review laments. A discourse about whaling or a novel just about going after the white whale would have both been interesting reads, but the way the they're woven together makes them stronger than either element would have been on their own. Kind of like Actraiser.
A very engaging mortician (Ask a Mortician) talks about how the real-life events on which the novel "Moby Dick" was based were so much more disturbing than the book ... https://youtu.be/QS299VkXZxI .
I think there is a whole generation of college students that have a visceral hatred of this book, not because of its quality, but because of professors trying to extract more symbolic meaning than was intended.
I also put together a collection of Melville’s short fiction, which includes “Bartleby”: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/short-fict...