I gave up on it today after reading about one third. The opportunity cost / enjoyment ratio was too high.
Someone convince me that I made a mistake.
You didn't necessarily make a mistake. It's a shame you didn't like it. It's something that I can't see American authors (or any authors) going without, but that doesn't really seem to mean much to people.
There's a kind of silly anti-classics mentality that I find a little irritating, but the opposite mentality is also annoying: the whole "All the best books have been written!" shtick. Both are just clever ways of being lazy and satisfited in ignorance.
If the first third didn't do it for you, you were probably right to stop — that's still like a couple hundred pages, isn't it? That's the length of a small novel.
I agree with Phil.
I get annoyed with writers who don't know the classics or who haven't read the authors who created the stepping stones of style for current authors. But I guess it's a pet peeve of mine.
I'm definitely not a "Kill-Yr-Idols" anti-traditionalist. Actually, I mostly read old writing. I haven't read a book published this year, which is not a matter of pride, just a fact.
There were things about Moby Dick I liked a lot, but the perpetual close-ups were really grating. I found the description was often inefficient and redundant. The choice moments were just not happening often enough, and the story is already familiar, so I ditched it. There's a 50/50 chance I'll pick it up again someday.
I read it a couple of summers ago. I have no idea how I got through it. The section about the different species of whales was especially grueling. I think I'd read it again though.
There is a time and a place for classics, just like there is a time and a place for bubble baths. When we were kids we had a lot of bubble baths and we only read the classics, mostly because that is what we were fed in school, but partially because we enjoyed it. (I did, anyway.) Now that we're adults, reading the classics isn't something we do often. Just like most of us don't take bubble baths often.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't. I'll be reading The Great Gatsby this December, mostly because my main character in my little project hates the book and I want to justify his reasons. (Let me clarify that I don't hate the book. It's one of the few I enjoyed in school.) After Gatsby I'll be picking up All's Quiet on the Western Front.
I think the old books are fantastic because of the characters. Characters are my favorite part of any book. Classical works are so different than what we write today, which is why I don't really read them anymore, but they stimulate other parts of our creative brain. They're old, yes, the birth place of cliche in some respects, but when I pick up a classic I find myself thinking of new ways to write things and new approaches to characters I didn't consider before.
If Moby Dick didn't entertain you--if it didn't tickle your muse or offer you something to think about--I don't think putting it down was a mistake. I recently tried reading This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The descriptions in the book were beautiful and I loved the ebb and sway of his words, but I ended up putting it down because the Armory Blaine was a difficult guy to follow.
I haven't had the opportunity to read Moby Dick, though. I'll pick up a copy and give it a go.
Side note: You will not ever catch me with Steinbeck in my hands. I will never read another one of his books in my lifetime. Ever. When his face appears on the cover of my Kindle, I contemplate tossing the device off the train. Harsh? Maybe.
Why does your character hate it?
I love writing characters who have views that are the opposite of my own. I had a character go on a major rant on why he hated coffee recently. Which is crazy talk in my eyes!
@averydoll My character didn't like the ending. He says he didn't like Gatsby, either, but I think he secretly did and that is why he was so ticked off by the ending.
I did consider having him read Catcher in the Rye instead, but I felt it would give my story an unwanted flavor. My character goes through struggles similar to Holden's and I didn't want to unintentionally drop in a mirror like that. I went with the Great Gatsby instead--it had a better contrast with my character's views on people and the theme of the book. but I haven't read the book in years, so I think a reread is in order before I hop into editing mode.
But a character hating coffee? Not even my antagonists hate coffee. A lot of them don't need coffee, or prefer something like tea instead, but never will they despise coffee. Unless they're a child, or drinking coffee is against their religion, or they're some sort of animal/human hybrid and coffee makes them ill.
That, Averydoll, is definitely some crazy talk!
I don't think the best books have been written. I think it's more of a challenge to us new writers to write something better than before, to explore new places in our brains and find different ways of telling a story. That is why we should all read the classics--we need to see what the old guys wrote back in the day so we can learn from them and make something better. Or try to, at least.
@misskokamon - you really just made me laugh with the hybrid bit! I did it because I almost make coffee a character in the book. EVERYONE drinks it. They have a serious discussion about a coffee maker not once, but TWICE. So I had to break the mold a little bit.
I haven't read Moby Dick. I'd like to, but I have a hard time reading stories that are already so much a part of our culture. I have the same problem with Oliver Twist. I'll get to them one day, but it's hard when there is always something new.
I definitely don't blame anyone for stopping after a hundred pages. A book needs to grab you right away, and no matter how good a book is, sometimes you just won't like it. It's admirable to even give Moby Dick a shot.
@misskokamon
I love the Great Gatsby. It's one of my favorite books next to A Seperate Peace. I realized recently that they are actually very similar stories when you read it as a story about one friend idolizing another.
Catcher in the Rye is a little cliche to have as a character's favorite book, but I think it could work as their most hated. Gatsby is an believable book to hate though. My wife hates it.
On Catcher: I liked the book very much. But, a professor I had called it a "universal coming of age story". I thought it was a rather specific coming of age story.
Someone in my class mentioned, only half joking that "Are you there God? It's me, Margaret" was another universal coming of age story, but the professor dismissed it as specific. Gender specific.
How is Caulfield's penis universal, but a girl's period is specific?
...and sorry for the off topic. I ramble.
How is Caulfield's penis universal, but a girl's period is specific?
I laughed.
You're right though. It isn't a universal coming of age story. Holden Caulfield was a depressed, troubled youth who never got over himself. I love the book, don't get me wrong, but nothing about the book hits me as a coming-of-age tale, or a universal one at least.
But it's sort of true, the whole universal penis/specific period thing spans across all genres and it started with the classics. Anyone can read a book with a male as the main character but it's a little harder getting into lady fiction. When a girl is the main character you assume a big portion of the plot will be romance-specific and you're constantly looking for possible love interests, even if it's a children's book. (The same thing happens to me with Miyazaki films.) When it's a boy, you focus more on adventure. I don't know if that's how it is with everyone, but that's how it is with me. When you read the classics you realize that's where it began. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is in love with Daisy. but if it was the other way around--if the narrator and gatsby were ladies and Daisy was actually named Danny--we'd see the book as a completely different sort of story.
If Ahab were a lady named--I don't know actually, think of something yoursself--we'd think her obsession with the whale was because she couldn't find a man or something, I'm sure.
If Holden was a girl--
no, no. I'm not even going to get into that. I can't even begin to analyze what sort of book Catcher in the Rye would be if Holden was Hilda.
Whoa. I totally took this discussion waaaay off topic. Sorry, guys.
I still want to know if Mr. Andolini was gonna molest him. Poor Holden. I think the most important thing Catcher did was make I possible for something to be considered literature but be written in everyday language. For a long time all writing was very formalized. Just like plath and others made free range poetry more acceptable in the academic circuit.
Maybe I'll add Catcher to my reading list in that other thread...
I need to find a used bookstore somewhere. Why can't there be more of those? It's San Francisco, for God's sake... yet we have no bookstores!
I'll find a copy of Moby Dick and see if I can get through the first third. If not, I'm sure there is an audiobook version somewhere to torrent purchase...
@ misskokamon I'll let you borrow my copy...oh wait. Sorry, can't pass it through the computer!
When I started writing my current WIP novel I got depressed at the start because I always imagined the book I wrote would not be a "romance", I thought it would be "important" (didn't we all think this way as teenagers??). Sheesh. The idea of romance seemed so awful to me. But it was the story I had. Then one day I thought - hey, did Fitzgerald JUST write a tragic love story?? I don't think so! Things can be elevated.
For some reason people view men as universal. I think you are correct on the reasoning. I think it has to do with romance. Always assuming it will go that way. And I guess often enough it does.... And if it doesn't...well, she was a dyke, right?
The Great Gatsby with gender reversal...oh dear. It does lose a little something.
Wow what an interesting issue... men as universal, women as specific? I had an objection on a similar thing long ago in a psychoanalysis class, based on Freud and some of his followers. The claim was that women want to have a phallus (and of course, it's not "just a penis") because women are supposed to feel they are lacking something essential. Yet should we not say that men want to have boobs?..... I was told that's not the same because boobs are not a signifier for power. But isn't it time in the 21st century to leave behind that mentality? I'm sure it was at work up to most of the 20th century, and it still is in many ways, but I feel like I should not be afraid to make my main characters women and alienate male audiences. I don't write romance and if I include love stories they are not cheesy, I hope. Men's romance is supposed to be deep, while women's is superficial? And women can't have other interests? I have to make myself a promise of one day writing the great universal-woman-character book. Wait, Toni Morrison did that already.
@J.Y. - to answer the original question. I once taught Moby Dick in a class that was given to me by someone else who dropped that class because of depression issues (T.M.I?). I would not have been so bold as to assign it otherwise, but when the students cried and begged for me to leave it out, I made a compromise: I told them which chapters they could skip (which were mostly the detailed, whaling chapters) and we focused on the character-driven chapters. Maybe they ended up reading about 2 thirds of the book? I don't know, but I was happy I could talk about it even if there were chapters we skipped.
No, no, I don't think women's romance is superficial. Personally I see romance in novels depicting a male lead in some sort of adventure type story to be superficial, and not in a bad way, just in a this-isn't-as-important-as-the-other-stuff-going-on sort of way. With books depicting a woman as the lead, romance is stronger. Even when the writer doesn't mean it, some readers focus on it because that is how we've been conditioned. Even in Rhys Ford's M/M Mystery novel Dirty Kiss, where our smashing lead finds himself falling for the murder victim's handsome cousin, the romance didn't feel like the main part of the book. (That book is quite good, by the way.)
Maybe it's just me. Maybe, as a girl, I find myself hoping the leading lady in whatever fiction I'm reading will find her one and only.
But it's true that by choosing a female as your lead, at least in children books and YA, you'll have a difficult time bringing in male readers. Tangled was called Rapunzel for a long time, but Disney worried they'd scare off the boys from seeing the movie.So they switched it to Tangled.
Every classical piece of fiction with a lady lead that I've read involved romance. Most of it was about the romance. Even Anne of Green Gables.
But I agree with you, Liana. It'd be nice to leave those days behind!
@Averydoll I love writing romance, don't get me wrong. But even then I tend to use a male lead. And if I'm writing M/M romance, which is also quite fun, I use the dominant man as the lead. It's so much fun that way. You seem to start off your one story that way, from the fellow's point of view. I thought that was good.
But yeah, back ont he topic of Moby Dick -- what was it about the book you didn't like? The perpetual close ups? Can you explain what that is exactly?
@the penis debaters - Yeah, it's weird isn't it? What "power" is actually unique to the penis? (barring stem-cells, cloning, genetic engineering, etc) It can impregnate women. Without getting too spiritual / metaphysical / psychoanalytical, that's basically it, right?
@m.koka - By perpetual close-ups I just meant the tight focus of the prose; frequent scenes where a character I don't particularly care about is musing and muttering about this and that for 2-3 pages, descriptions of shipboard goings-on which, in my opinion, are (as I said above) needlessly drawn out. I don't feel like I have any clearer an idea of what's going on after reading a five paragraph description when one would have sufficed. It's just a style thing. Some people eat that stuff up. Those weird cetology passages everyone talks about were more interesting than I'd expected, but the story itself was less so. But like I said, I might pick it up again someday.
I was told that's not the same because boobs are not a signifier for power.
Which is complete b.s.
But in general, I think a female reader is more open to reading anything, no matter the lead. And a male reader limits himself in many ways with an "I can't relate to this" mentality.
The universal woman character book....I'm going to think on this idea for a bit.....
I dont understand why anybody would read Moby Dick when you can just see the movie.
To be fair to the psychoanalysts in this discussion: what Liana's referring to is the phallus, not the penis. The phallus, as a concept in some strands of psychoanalysis, does refer to power, but it ISN'T the penis precisely because neither gender is in control of it. It's a long and complicated argument, but the bottom line is that it has very little to do with biological definitions of sex.
@Phil -- Ah. So could the "phallus" be non-human? belonging perhaps to a giant seafaring mammal?
I can guarantee my explanation won't do it justice, because it's a concept that depends on a lot of other concepts, all of them difficult, but the phallus relates to language and the process of signification — it is, in a way, a word without meaning that sets off the other words. It involves power in the sense that it implies something that's missing, and brings into play a human longing to feel somehow complete, so that each of us is implicated in the functioning of the phallus. In a sense, the phallus is what's "missing" and we construct our lives in different ways in terms of finding it.
There are lots of reasons they call it the phallus. A major one is that neither men nor women have permanent access to an erect penis (men can't always "be" erect, and women can't always "have" an erect man) and this idea of "being" or "having" plays a major role in how sexuality is constructed for these psychoanalysts.
It's exceptionally complex. Sigh.
They can have vibrators or dildos which is a phallus of a sort. If a woman straps one on and fucks her gf, is it any less penetration??
Like I said, it's not literal.
Symbols are either consciously chosen or develop naturally as an abstract from reality. Either the phallus (which ultimately is a penis, even if it has technically non-penile attributes as a symbol) bears some real resemblance to "what's missing" or "what we all actually want" and became the symbol as a result of this similarity or it's been willfully assigned to represent the concept in what might be described as the greatest dick joke ever told.
True, it's really not a penis. It is a male signifier, though. You may say that neither gender has it and it's gender neutral, but it isn't, in fact, because language and signification are based on power relations and we can't deny that these are defined from a masculine perspective in Western cultures (and not only). That's why you can't use "boobs" as a replacement for a phallus. Women who are overly aggressive (in the sense of playing the power game well) are still thought of as emulating men--frauds or imitators. I'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's how language still works.
Who would've thought that Lacan would make his way into the conversation. There, I said the L word.
If a "phallus" is "not really a penis" why would they use an ancient word which means "penis?" If there is/was no better term to use for the concept, surely one must admit the concept is supposed to bear some abstract resemblance to a penis?
Ceci n'est pas une pénis?
Pardon my ignorance.
Also, I have never in my life typed "penis" so many times.
I remembered something I liked about Moby Dick, this sentence: "Ye be, be ye?"
Did you know a dork is nother name for a whale penis? Ahab was chasing after his own masculinity and the whale represented God.
So Ahab's own masculinity was God?
I am so fucking around. I hate analyzing literature. This is why I gave up being an English major. It just feels like pretentious bullshit, sorry.
No apology needed, I thought so. Here's a belated ;-P
No one likes reading the classics but they like that they read them. There is my paraphrase/mis-quote of Mark Twain.
What about the classical writers? Unless your getting a liberal arts degree, is it just as important that we read them? I mean other than enjoyment.
But the fun of it is in going in any direction you want with the interpretation. Ahab was also gay, was also an American imperialist, was also everyman, was also the Other, was also defeated by Woman, defeated by Language too, was also a dictator and was also an idealist looking for the Sublime, the Signifier, Utopia, the Other, his Mother/Father and his ego ideal. I'm making these things up - it's been a while since I took the Melville class.
Is that from Pirates of the Caribbean?
Yeah it's the new one I think.
Classics are important, whether you like to read them or not. If they are called classics by the literary establishment, are taught in schools, are constantly in print, then they continue to influence literature and its criticism. Even so, no one likes every classic and I wouldn't say it's necessary that people read them.
Good cause I hate Jane Austen.
Reading The Count Of Monte Cristo took a lot out of me. Still haven't finished Dante's Inferno or Ulysses. Probably never will finish them. How sad. I have to finish them now.
