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Recently 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-chapt

Recently 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 ago
In 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 ago
  That is a pretty elaborate excuse for the 100s of pages of whale taxonomy and physiology that interrupt the narrative.
StillBored 5y ago
And 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".
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  > HS literature cirriculum having zero relatability to students so they're unable to comprehend why the books are "great" I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before. Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as well-rounded individuals.
  - not2b 5y ago
    You're lumping in Steinbeck with Shakespeare and Moby-Dick? His topics are much more relevant to what is going on for many students today and the language is much less dated.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      In my specific case, it was due to going to one of the better-off suburban school districts. Even though it was obvious that the characters were stuck in a Dickensean world at the intellectual level, none of us had the real-world experience to get what it's like to be a migrant farm worker at the gut level or even to suddenly have perspective of our less-affluent classmates. My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.
- zokier 5y ago
  Of the many possible "classics" to throw at teenagers I feel Moby Dick is far from the worst option. At least it has some humor to it, and on one layer it is just an adventure at sea; its not just pure pathos. And compared to many others its relatively short novel, especially if you skip some of the non-essential whaling chapters.
wrycoder 5y ago
Time aboard a square-rigger is days of near idleness punctuated by a few hours of sheer panic. Holystone the decks!
emodendroket 5y ago
I can't remember being bored by any part of the book.

dataviz1000 5y ago

In 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 ago
That is a pretty elaborate excuse for the 100s of pages of whale taxonomy and physiology that interrupt the narrative.

StillBored 5y ago

And 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".

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
> HS literature cirriculum having zero relatability to students so they're unable to comprehend why the books are "great" I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before. Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as well-rounded individuals.
- not2b 5y ago
  You're lumping in Steinbeck with Shakespeare and Moby-Dick? His topics are much more relevant to what is going on for many students today and the language is much less dated.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    In my specific case, it was due to going to one of the better-off suburban school districts. Even though it was obvious that the characters were stuck in a Dickensean world at the intellectual level, none of us had the real-world experience to get what it's like to be a migrant farm worker at the gut level or even to suddenly have perspective of our less-affluent classmates. My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.
zokier 5y ago
Of the many possible "classics" to throw at teenagers I feel Moby Dick is far from the worst option. At least it has some humor to it, and on one layer it is just an adventure at sea; its not just pure pathos. And compared to many others its relatively short novel, especially if you skip some of the non-essential whaling chapters.

wrycoder 5y ago

Time aboard a square-rigger is days of near idleness punctuated by a few hours of sheer panic. Holystone the decks!

emodendroket 5y ago

I can't remember being bored by any part of the book.