I finished Moby Dick recently…and finally. I wanted to see if it was really as good and bad as my brother said. And the answer is “yes.” Resoundingly so. Here it is in a nutshell:
1. Herman Melville desperately needed an editor.
2. It has to be one of the easiest books in the world to abridge.
3. I loved the language of all of the meaningful chapters.
4. I’m sure fans of 19th century whaling history love all of the other chapters.
5. I was honestly disturbed by the various descriptions of whale slaughter.
6. It ended very well, and perhaps that’s why people always considered it a great book. Maybe in the minds of its readers it redeemed itself.
Moby Dick is well worth reading…if you can make the slog to get to the last eighth of the book. Knowing what I know now, if I were to read it again I think I could fairly well abridge as I go.
Like my brother, I’ll probably never read it again…
So true, though I actually may read it again some day when I have retired and I’ve run out of other things to read.
there are far too many books in the world to circle back to this one…but come to think of it, i’d read most of it before and that didn’t stop me, so maybe some abridgment on the fly someday…