What Fiction are you reading this week, June 2, 2024

[NanaCat]

29. I may be in the minority of people who

Don't like Moby Dick. The first 14% is quite good. After that, Melville makes a fatal mistake: He spends too much time telling not showing, and it takes the reader away from the rich characterizations, and the theme of the book itself.

The fix would have been easy enough: Melville needed to fold all of the data about whales and ships into Ishmael's training as a newcomer to whaling. Show him getting first hand experience with the different kinds of ropes and their purposes, rather than telling us about it. Complete amateur hour mistake.

That's why I found it a dreary and annoying read, because it not only feels like the most boring non-fiction book ever, but also because much of the so-called science is flat-out wrong. I'm not even a marine biologist, and I knew a bunch of what he was claiming as fact was utter tosh.

I was mad when I finally finished it--from the long hours of drudge reading that laid waste to a fantastic story of obsession gone mad and the unlikely but lovely (and near-homoerotic) friendship with Queequeg. Those parts make a classic of the book, while the constant tangents into arcane and wrongheaded details almost destroy it all.