I think it's the Melieu apsects of Moby Dick that put many people off from it. I wouldn't say the whole story is melieu, but those chapters that inventory all the accoutrements of the 19th century whaling industry definitely are. Apparently parts of a book can use different approaches, between Melieu, Idea, Character and Event. Look into Orson Scott Card's MICE system if you're interested. This hit me like a revelation.
Got it. I'd say the main thing that turns people off to Moby Dick is that it's 170 years old and eye-gouging-ly boring. I've read it twice because I thought I might have been too young to appreciate it in high school, but I'd rather read the ingredients of a shampoo bottle in Japanese for 12 hours than read it again.
Yeah, that's what milieu does to people today if they're expecting plot or character. Though you might also just not like Melville's writing even in the other parts. Personally I loved it, even the inventories. It's hard to say why, it's about things happeneing at a deep level that I can't articulate. Same kind of reasons I love the movie version of The Shining. When I walked out of the theater I had no idea what I just saw, but I knew I loved it.
Read Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone. Sci fi fantasy, contemporary, had good reviews. It was basically portal fantasy in that the main character is brutally killed in the current era, then wakes up naked on a space station (Burroughs' John Carter started with him dying, didn't it?). Great hook. This is grand sci fantasy bearing pulp flair, so ship-sized people, planet-sized ships, solar-system wide space battles abound. That part's fine. The main character is interesting, too. She applies her hyper-ambitious CEO mind to every challenge she faces, which delivers well on her pre-death occupation, and she is just likeable in general. She's got a good variation of competence, coldness, vulnerability, boldness, uncertainty. Well-rounded, well-written. Meanwhile, all of the other characters are astoundingly boring. I don't know if it was an effort to contrast her aggressive tenacity or an attempt at demonstrating alien minds. Either way I spent the whole book not giving a damn about them. They were vapid, childish, or so passive that they should have just been potted plants instead. It also seems Gladstone had to strip every male of masculinity in order to sell the reader on every single society having female rulers. Doesn't bother me; I'm not going to tell him I know how men will act thousands of years from now or that it's a little surprising all future women are lesbians. It's his fantasy and I'm down to roll with choices like that. What he failed to sell me on were the leadership capabilities of those established rulers from scale of tribe to those guiding billions of actors, regardless of gender. Getting to the point, it seems like a case of hamstringing the other characters in order to make up for others' deficiencies, rather than going whole-hog on convincing the reader that certain characters are in certain positions due to overwhelming merit compared to an average being. The plot is broadly good and specifically bad. The overall concept is really good. it's just how it gets there that is uninspired, which is frustrating because the time it has to flesh out themes is definitely underutilized. The prose was mostly good until it got too unhinged for a-hair-too-long spans of experimentation. I applaud those attempts, of course—yes, someone's going outside the box!—but the repetition is just a bit too much, makes the segments thin, skim-worthy. Over all I give it about 3 eggplants.
Melville is one of my favorite authors and I simply love Moby Dick. Tbh I initially bought it because it was thick and all imported paperbacks cost 1500yen, no matter what, but I got hooked in right away. There are parts that drag a bit but Melville's detail on the subject of whaling and his humor are just amazing. Read it probably five or six times at a minimum. But it was voluntary, I was an adult and a veteran which I think made it more accessible.
I first was assigned Moby Dick in 9th grade and unlike a lot of assigned reading at the time, I immediately loved it. Hilarious, weird, ignoring all the rules of the way a novel is supposed to be written.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern Wonderful book with amazingly abstract concepts sometimes written from the POV of objects. The setting is strange, enchanting, fantastical. Beautiful sentences to capture the wonder of a book filled with so many abstract concepts, stories and not all necessarily in chronology. People who become lost in time, then found again, and if anyone wants to hear the tale of how it came to be that time fell in love with fate, and what the stars and the moon thought about that, then you might need to pick up this book. Although there is a central character, there are many in between stories that interrupt the main plot that are perhaps or perhaps not connected to the main story, as a lot of it seems to be a metaphor for something else. The only flaw in the reading is that it still doesn’t feel as if you know the MC by the time you get to the end, but there’s too much beauty in the writing to allow that to be a criticism. The setting and abstract concepts are more developed than the characters. A couple are brought up in a story and then not inferred to again.
Same. Looks like I’m breaking my vow not to buy any more books until I’ve finished off my pile first, lol
I haven't finished Un Lun Dun yet but I said I needed something meatier so I'm on my second re-read of Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place. It is the book about the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. 463 pages of about 8 point text that lucidly explain everything from the supply line failures to the personalities of the leaders to the tactical significance of a destroyed aircraft to events at the UN Security Council. Fall was fatally ill anyway when he was killed on patrol with the US Marines a few years later, but I really wish he'd been able to hang around and provide his insights on future events.
Sounds fascinating, but my days of comfortably reading 8 point font are long gone. I wish history books were printed in several volumes with twelve point print instead of one ginormous volume of pinpoints.
The type isn't a problem where you get them in audio format. A bad narrator is a huge issue. I remember David Weber's safehold series, where the changed the narrator a few books into the series. Complete change of accents for the characters, place names mispronounced. Almost cost me a phone.
I'm absolutely with you, my eyes are barely holding on for this book. It's a crime that Fall's work hasn't been converted over to some kind of e-book format and I can't understand why. It's scholarly but very readable stuff and he's been dead since 1968, can't imagine the estate is jealously guarding the purity of it or whatever. Street Without Joy is available, but The Two Vietnams seems to be actually out of print. Somebody needs to get Project Gutenberg on this.
True, and I do listen to audio books in the car. I have also not made it through the first chapter because of a terrible narrator. Sometimes I listen to audio books inside while I do hand embroidery or mending, As a general rule, I prefer print, especially with history books, so I can flip back and refresh my memory and check facts as need be. Hard to do that with an audio book.
After reading of his death a couple of months ago, I picked up Cormac McCarthy's The Road and read it yesterday. OK, I guess, but 2007 must have been a slow year for the Pulitzer committee.
I'm reading his Child of God. Batshit, bonkers crazy, but it draws you through (me anyway). The writing gets incredibly poetic at times, and the MC lives more like an animal than a man.
I enjoyed The Road but ditched Blood Meridian short of halfway through. There were no characters that I liked and no characters that I hated enough to wish for a comeuppance. Just a whole bunch of shitty people being shitty for no reason, or none that I recall. Saw the film of No Country for Old Men and felt pretty much the same way.
I haven't deleted Blood Meridian yet, thinking I'll get back to it and finish it out of sheer stubbornness. I jumped ship just after the 1/3 mark, which leaves a daunting amount to get through, if I ever do. Call me crazy, but I like a novel with a story.
A novel with a story? Are you crazy? I've been listening to Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm for a very long time since it is only a five minute drive to work. The main characters are small time small town youthful crooks and the reader is supposed to sympathize because of their unfortunate childhoods. The author writes well and the book has interesting moments, but I don't like any of the characters. I'm halfway through the last CD, so I'll last it out to see what happens. Had I been reading the book, I'd have skipped ahead to read the end and been done with it.
