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Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
- duffyjp 5y ago"Without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous" In the modern vernacular, "jumping the shark."
- fortyseven 5y ago1851? For some reason I assumed ol' Dick was much older than that. Neat.
- Celebros 5y agoLove Moby Dick. One thing I've wanted to do for a few years is make the trip to New Bedford Whaling Museum for the annual marathon reading. It's also streamed every year. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/the-moby-dick-marathon/ https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/the-moby-dick-marathon...
- gshubert17 5y agoThere's a whaling museum in Lahaina on Maui, which has lots of good stuff. I happened to visit it one time while a book group was reading Moby Dick and it made a great impression. https://www.hawaii-guide.com/maui/sights/whalers_village_museum https://www.hawaii-guide.com/maui/sights/whalers_village_mus...
- emodendroket 5y agoI never did hear the annual marathon reading, but I did visit the museum when I lived in Massachusetts and I recommend it.
- Celebros 5y agoI agree, the museum is great. I visited there shortly after I read Moby Dick and that was where I learned about the marathon. But I was there in August and not January so missed it as well. Sadly I live in the Midwest. Will have to try to plan when there isn’t a horrible snow storm to make it there in the future. My wife visited the museum on Nantucket and said that was also a very enjoyable experience.
- zabzonk 5y agoMy review: A brilliant book, possibly my favourite of all the books I have read, which is a lot, and certainly one that I have enjoyed re-reading time and again. Tragic that it wasn't more widely appreciated in Melville's lifetime. A must read.
- billfruit 5y agoYes, it is if every sentence in it is a thoughtfully crafted poetic fragment. And many of the chapters essentially nonfiction, a sort of encyclopaedia of Whales and Whaling. "Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!"
- bombcar 5y agoIt's apparently the style of the time - Les Miserables spends a decent amount of time talking about sewers iirc.
- billfruit 5y agoAnd minutiae about court cases, legal precedent of the era. Similar with Count of Monte Cristo as well, the details of the Mediterranean smuggling trade it goes into is simply amazing.
- Kaibeezy 5y agoWhat, ho? Someone hath run Neal Stephenson’s reviews through 1851translator.com?
- bookofjoe 5y agohttps://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm
- relaunched 5y agoThe language of the reviews is quizzical. I caught myself thinking how high-brow language once was. Then, it dawned on me the sense of intentionality and craftsmanship displayed by each sentence. U up? Who dis? :emoji :emoji :emoji I'm not sure if I'm nostalgic, sad or just a little bit of, "get off my lawn."_
- pkage 5y agoYou're comparing highbrow literature reviews in leading magazines to short instant messages, which are a significantly different medium designed to be read by one or two people once, and then thrown away. Your best comparison is telegram style[0], which is not dissimilar to today's texts—complete with its own slang and shorthand. Nobody's writing "u up" in the New Yorker. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style
- relaunched 5y agoI can't help but think that telegram style was more a function of the exorbitant cost and pricing model of sending a telegram. https://newatlas.com/last-telegraph-message/28314/#:~:text=In%201860%2C%20for%20example%2C%20a,cost%20%24100%20(about%20%242%2C600) https://newatlas.com/last-telegraph-message/28314/#:~:text=I.... Relative to wages in the 1860s, telegrams were very expensive. https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2016/10/where-the-money-wentin-1860/ https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2016/10/where-the-money-w...
- mwcampbell 5y agoComposing a text message on a touchscreen keyboard has its own cost. Not monetary, but still something to minimize.
- drzaiusapelord 5y agoIf you think they didn't have slang in the 19th century then you are mistaken. You can't compare academic writing to slang and pretend society has devolved. We live in a time where people who would be locked out of the publication process for "reasons" can now write books. Where literacy is the highest ever. Where more books get published than ever. The incredible progress in publishing should be praised, not disingenuously mocked.
- m_myers 5y agoRecently ran across this interesting guide to Moby-Dick: "The 100 Chapters of Moby Dick You Can Skip - And why you won’t want to" https://baos.pub/the-100-chapters-of-moby-dick-you-can-skip-164c74778af0 https://baos.pub/the-100-chapters-of-moby-dick-you-can-skip-... The point is that while most of the book is incredibly boring, that's a feature and not a bug.
- dataviz1000 5y agoIn order to be excited some small part of you must be bored or as Melville explains it ... “To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale
- ericmcer 5y agoThat is a pretty elaborate excuse for the 100s of pages of whale taxonomy and physiology that interrupt the narrative.
- StillBored 5y agoAnd yet, this book, along with The Count of Monte Cristo, Grapes of Wrath, and quite a number of other tomes are assigned in high schools by teachers/school districts. Those educators think they are providing some kind of service by trying to force feed young people books that cannot really be understood in a meaningful way by the vast majority of people with ~15 years of life. It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the rest of the novel. I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long "classics".
- blululu 5y ago“To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes.” Could not agree more 170 years later. My girlfriend and I are currently reading the book aloud to each other before bed and almost every page is a master work of the English language.
- pieix 5y agoThis review is a fantastic reproduction of Melville's style in Moby-Dick. It must have been intentional, and tongue-in-cheek!
- scop 5y agoI am also reading it for the first time right now. I am absolutely blown away by it. It has an energy to it that is difficult to convey, as if it was written by a mad man all in one sitting. There are sentences or paragraphs that go on and and on I find myself thinking "Ok Melville went a little too far here" and then, by golly, he brings it all together in a flourish. The language is simultaneously as descriptive as anything I've read, yet curiously opaque. It's perhaps best described by a passage from a novel of similar linguistic stature, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: > It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
- defen 5y agoMcCarthy lists Moby-Dick as his favorite book [1]. The otherwise-impenetrable sentence "The Dipper stove." from the first page of Blood Meridian will be immediately understandable to anyone familiar with early 19th century whaling expeditions. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html?_r=2 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/s...
- robin_reala 5y agoIf anyone’s looking for a nice and libre ebook of Moby Dick, I produced one for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick I also put together a collection of Melville’s short fiction, which includes “Bartleby”: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/short-fiction https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/short-fict...
- googlryas 5y agoThank you for that, I'm definitely going to check out both. Since I checked out your profile to see what kind of person does these beautiful things for free...can you tell me why it is so hard to order online from ikea?
- robin_reala 5y agoI got most of the way through an answer about IKEA, but I’m not sure realistically how much I can say publicly. But it’s fairly obvious (my opinion, I’m not speaking for my employer here) at least that the pandemic has hit the logistics of IKEA in the US more than it has in other markets.
- rickspencer3 5y agoThank you!
- DantesKite 5y agoThank you for your contributions. Standard Ebooks is one of my favorite websites and a delight to people in creative design and typography.
- gbjw 5y agoThank you so much! Moby-Dick is my favourite novel --- appreciate the effort.
- lou1306 5y agoGoing through the Moby Dick one right now, and I must say it's a great edition. Thank you and the other Standard Ebooks contributors!
- optimalsolver 5y agoFor the lazy, there's a free Moby Dick audiobook on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg84olIrn-kb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg84olIrn-kb
- marai2 5y agoNice! It's 23 hours and 54 minutes long! 15 minutes a day listen and I'll be done in 100 days!
- protomyth 5y agoI think there is a whole generation of college students that have a visceral hatred of this book, not because of its quality, but because of professors trying to extract more symbolic meaning than was intended.
- aidenn0 5y agoI don't know. I was never assigned it for class, but I tried reading it on my own and hated it. Melville and Joyce are the two well respected literature authors I can't stand.
- fabriceleal 5y agoI'm a non native english speaker trying to read this book, sort of gave it up around (i think) half to read other books in the waiting list. Most of the interludes are not that engaging to me (whale classification chapter comes to mind), which is a pity since I enjoyed the actual narrative.
- wolverine876 5y ago> Most of the interludes are not that engaging to me (whale classification chapter comes to mind), FWIW, that is the experience of many English speakers; it's a feature, not a bug, so to speak.
- yariik 5y ago> whale classification chapter Thanks, looks like a book I would enjoy, I'll read it now.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoYeah, a few people have mentioned these as low points. But I really liked them. Reminds me of some of the stuff I enjoy in Umberto Eco's historical novels where he dives deep into some historical worldview, often one we now know is wrong, though I think in this case Melville was relating the current state of the art of his age, but both do so quite poetically. Some of the cod-Shakespearean bits were a bit more of a drag for me. Something for everyone maybe.
- dehrmann 5y ago> The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. I have to agree with this. The book certainly has its merits, but story isn't one of them...which is sad because I think there could be something interesting in the vendetta story, but 90% of it was spent discussing whaling (which is interesting on its own).
- jrumbut 5y agoThis was approximately what I thought the first time I read it, except I didn't find the vendetta story interesting. On subsequent reads (and especially listening to it read aloud and as an audiobook), my opinion turned on its head. The structure reflects whaling, with weeks of discussion about ropes and navigation punctuated by relatively brief periods of excitement. Ahab and the whale are left vague because that makes them grander in the imagination than they could possibly be when thoroughly described. The whale is just out there looking for squid, it's the people on the boat that have made it out to be something different.
- jimbler 5y agoAlso, it's an amazing audio book, you can really appreciate the beauty and musicality (and weirdness) of the language. Especially appreciate this version (the Big Read). https://soundcloud.com/moby-dick-big-read https://soundcloud.com/moby-dick-big-read
- skyechurch 5y agoI had read Moby Dick before, and found it enjoyable, but listening to the William Hootkins audio version opened it up for me in a way my reading of the text never did (eg it's actually a very funny book, which entirely escaped my notice). Whether this is because I was an inattentive reader, or that 170 years ago people had fewer demands on their attention, I don't know.
- dang 5y agoOne past thread: The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209719 - Sept 2017 (29 comments) Related: 'Bartleby the Scrivener' – Herman Melville (1853) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671613 - Sept 2021 (3 comments) The Man Who Edited Melville (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736842 - Oct 2020 (1 comment) Herman Melville at Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547911 - July 2019 (2 comments) What Happened to the Book Herman Melville Wrote After ‘Moby-Dick’? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983571 - May 2018 (16 comments) Why Does Moby-Dick Sometimes Have a Hyphen? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12939407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12939407 - Nov 2016 (19 comments) I Used Google BigQuery to Map the Locations Mentioned in Herman Melville's Books - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11573730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11573730 - April 2016 (2 comments) White whale in the big smoke: How the geography of London inspired Moby-Dick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728471 - Dec 2015 (2 comments) Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of Wall Street - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10449293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10449293 - Oct 2015 (9 comments) Before Moby-Dick, There Was “Two Years Before the Mast” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877987 - July 2015 (12 comments)
- asimpletune 5y agoOne of the things that I think is strange about Moby Dick is the shift in language. SPOILERS: So most of the book is just a beautiful snapshot of a very odd slice of life in the early 1800s, namely whalers. However, not just any whaler, the book is very clear on this, sperm whalers. Also, not just any sperm whalers, nantucketers. Even though the majority of the crew is international, they are on a nantucket ship, with a nantucket captain, and are thus honorary nantucketers. Ok, so anyway, most of the book is just about learning what their life is like, and it's unusual in the way because Melville literally had to teach us everything about this unusual slice of life, to get the rest. My point though is throughout all of this, which is like 90% of the book, the language and tone is somewhat plain and often times light hearted. There are a few moments where its serious, like when there's the electrical storm and Ahab fixes the compass, or when they're towards the end of their journey and they see another ship of nantucketers who weren't driven to kill the whale, but just to make money and they're just rolling in the dough, throwing everything overboard just to make more room for more sperm oil. MORE SPOILERS: Any way, then in the end is really where we see a huge dramatic shift in language. For one thing it becomes *hard*, even as a native speaker the sentence structure, word choice, and ideas being conveyed are just harder. Basically what's happening this whole time is Ahab is trying to kill the whale, is failing to do so, and we're sort of consummating what sort of felt inevitable the whole time but from Ahab's perspective. I think in this sense, Moby DIck is really unique because it's almost two stories: there's all the fun stuff about learning about whaling, and then there's the artful part of it. The change is very dramatic. Any way, I think it's a great book, but it's very different than say Typee, where the whole book stays in the same tone as the first part of Moby Dick that I described. The last 50 or so pages of Moby Dick, are borderline psychedelic.
- nwatson 5y agoA very engaging mortician (Ask a Mortician) talks about how the real-life events on which the novel "Moby Dick" was based were so much more disturbing than the book ... https://youtu.be/QS299VkXZxI https://youtu.be/QS299VkXZxI .
- emodendroket 5y agoMoby Dick is a fascinating book, and I think part of what makes it work so well is the alternating, aside-heavy style that the second review laments. A discourse about whaling or a novel just about going after the white whale would have both been interesting reads, but the way the they're woven together makes them stronger than either element would have been on their own. Kind of like Actraiser.