#2 - Moby Dick

Well, isn't this one a whole different kettle of fish? (I make no promises as to how many fish/whale puns I make during this post) When I took this one out of the library, it gave me a shiver. This book is spoken of, not with reverence, but with fear and venomous distrust. There are some people who do not like this book.

I am one of those people.

This book is a beautifully written, complex tapestry of words and stories and characters and plots and themes and history and geography and cetology and - IT IS TOO MUCH. This book is simply too large for its meaning. It goes on and on with no goal but to dredge some more imagery out of every last item on the great wide ocean. There is not a thing not addressed, not a stone left unturned. It is boring as all hell. I honestly could care less about the architecture of the awnings in Nantucket. Get on that boat and shoot some whales!

The book weighs in at 469 pages, with 135 chapters. That means that some of the chapters are less than a page, and some of the chapters are of proper length. But this allowed Melville (who, coincidentally, was rumoured to have been paid by the word, which explains his painful verbosity) to turn each chapter into an essay on a completely different topic. If I went back and counted (which I won't, because I do not want to touch the filthy book again), I would assume that barely half of the chapters are actually used to further the plot.

In the interest of full transparency, I skipped a few of the 135 chapters. The first two I skipped were Chapters 9 and 32. Chapter 9 is called The Sermon, and it is exactly that. Father Mapple's 6-page sermon (a friend and I estimated it to be a 25-minute filibuster) on the story of Jonah and the whale. Chapter 32 was Ishmael's personal theory on the taxonomy of whales. Ishmael, in a thrilling conclusion, deems whales to not be mammals, but fish, and then proceeds to define their species in a way that can best be described as...wrong. He creates species, pushes species where they do not belong, and declares such whales as the Blue Whale as "fictional". This again came in at around 6 pages of utter nonsense, which did nothing to advance the plot. I tried my best to read every chapter. I finished the one on the history of mast-heads, in the first low-point of my reading.

As a last point, there was still a good 30 more pages left. What were they used for? Endnotes. A good 500 of them. You see, to make the book OOZE sophistication, Melville name-dropped worse than Kevin Federline. The effect was to make the book thoroughly incomprehensible unless you had bachelor's degrees in History, Geography, Literature, and Religion. Of course, you had to have recieved these degrees in 1850, because half of the references are now out of date entirely.

After slogging through this torture for almost a week, I declared one night that I would not spend another morning waking up to this book. So I started on Chapter 45 that night and pushed all the way through to 2 AM and page 470. Never again.

3/10