Speaking of the Pequod… if Moby-Dick isn’t the longest book in the whole galaxy, I don’t know what is! Anna Karenina, my edition of Bantam’s as well, comes a close second but it’s Russian and I blamed it on the translation. Moby-Dick just made me bleed and almost cry out in frustration. I attempted giving it up a lot of times but the fact that I didn’t, and went on to finish, says a lot about my patience, endurance and will-power. And I am not the only one who feels the same way. Rachel McAdams had this to say about it.
The book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne who Herman Melville admired. It’s funny because I also didn’t find The Scarlet Letter very fun. Maybe they both are a kind that’s just beyond me. But The Scarlet Letter I did get, though it was a kind that was beyond Dickens dreary.
I still would recommend reading Moby-Dick, though. There are some who really do like it. And perhaps I would, too, in the future. But if you read it and you get lost after the second page, then perhaps you’d feel about it like I did, so put it back on the shelf and put it off for another ten years or so. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to rush it. You can still go on, but I warn you, some of the parts I had to read twice but still couldn’t understand… although, that might say more about my intelligence than about the book, but I did warn.
a book diary 