"The Moby Dick Big Read" (check out the link)

[Lex]

Free audio online. The 1st chapter is read by Tilda Swinton, and John Waters reads a chapter somewhere, and other folks . . .

From the site:

‘I have written a blasphemous book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.

http://www.mobydickbigread.com/


I heard about it on NPR today. Looks cool.

[TuxedoKat]

1. I love this book

Thanks for the info.

[Goblinmonger]

2. I hate this book.

But this does look cool. I will make it available to my American Lit Honors students.

[TuxedoKat]

3. Ah, what a pity

you didn't like it. The professor who had us read it for his course had used it as part of his doctoral thesis and he had many interesting things to say about the novel. I would have missed these insights if I had read Moby Dick on my own and I probably wouldn't have liked it either if I hadn't taken his class.

[Goblinmonger]

4. My first read was for an American Romanticism class in college

My prof, too, did his dissertation on Moby Dick. He waxed on about how hilarious the middle chapters were. I understood the satirical point, just didn't think it was that awesome. I read it again a few years ago as a promise to my cousin who is an English prof because she assured me I would like it more now that I am older. She was wrong.

I will freely admit it is because of the writing style of the times. Melville is clearly very gifted. I also hate Dickens. The desire to wax on and on and on about a topic just isn't for me. 3 pages to point out the irony of a whale that is evil being white which is a symbol of good seems excessive to me, as an example.

[dmallind]

6. The sententiousness of MD fans always irks me.

It's one of those "great books" that many seem to be convinced you cannot both understand and dislike. I can't remember the number of discussions with fans I've had that always begin along the lines of "Well you just have to understand the symbolism and the sly characterization and then you'll like it".

I do. I still don't.

It's not the turgid prose that does it for me. I'm a big fan of Dickens' better stuff, and read more mid 19th Century books than those of any other period. Hell, Dombey and Son takes a few pages to describe a doorway and it works well. It is instead the utterly wasted and aimless structure of much of Melville's book. I suspect it would make a fine 80 page novella. Long books are fine when they need to be long. Middlemarch springs to mind. Moby Dick certainly doesn't qualify. You can get all the symbolism and characterization you want without making 70% of your work double as an intermediate level technical whaling manual.

The only other "great book" I know of that has this built-in pretentiousness among its fan base that only ignorance prevents worship is another one I dislike - Ulysses. Yes yes I get the different structure of each of the chapters symbolizing different parts of the Odyssey as much as the story itself. Yes yes I get the cultural archetypes. It just doesn't work as a book except as a comp. lit. student's idea of mental masturbation.

And I know damn well 90% of either's fans are saying to themselves, and quite likely me too eventually, "well you just don't REALLY understand it", and that's the problem (the attitude, not my understanding; it's certain many people have deeper knowledge of these works than I do, but it's also certain many fans have a much lesser grasp than I too). It's somehow OK not to like the way Proust or Flaubert or Hardy or Lawrence or Nabokov or Rushdie writes. It's even OK not to like other Melville or Joyce works. For some reason though the general consensus of way too high a percentage of real or self-declared literature experts to be genuinely organic is that only hapless Grisham fans dislike those two. It's like a self-perpetuating "badge" of literacy to brook no criticism of them.

But then again I am a devoted fan of Shakespeare who ranks Hamlet as a middling to weak example of his efforts. Strangely though I'm not generally speaking an iconoclast or contrarian arbiter of literature. I agree Barnaby Rudge is Dickens mailing it in and Little Dorrit is him overdosing on saccharin - very normal views. I agree Milton - an epic poet unequalled in his millenium - couldn't write a sonnet worth a groat, another typical view. Midnight's Children really is Rushdie's best. Wodehouse never really did match Jeeves and Wooster in other stories. I just can't stomach the received wisdom of Orthodox Opinion on Dick, Leo and the Dithering Dane.

[Union Scribe]

5. One of my first literary loves

The chapter called "The Forge" is still one of the most bone-chilling mental scenes of any book I've ever read. Ahab raving at the blacksmith and then dripping blood over the red hot harpoon. Amazing stuff.