I think I'm too stupid for Moby Dick. I don't get the religious allegories, the text is extremely dense, even as a fan of 19th century literature, and it's very meandering. I don't think I'm a stupid person, but this is genuinely filtering me
>>25596026then don't read it. life is too short to vainly trouble yourself about books other people think are classics.
>>25596031But I want to read the epic whaling book
>>25596026I think I'm too genetically inferior to lift a 140 kg squat. Whenever I try it, I fail to lift it up or I have to sit it right down in fear of injuring myself.
>>25596060you need to remove some plates. start small, diary of a wimpy kid. Work your way up
>>25596026Start with He rapes his sister, Phoebe. It is one of the most simple hostile narrators available. I'm not asking you to read Nabokov or a Russian Great Realist. Just read the psychoanalytical account of a child raped by his father who rapes his sister while on a drunken bender.
>>25596100I have never felt such a surge of embarrassing cringe than when I re-read Catcher at 30, remembering I really liked it as a teenager, and felt nothing but disgust and cringe at Holden.
>>25596101What's worse is Phoebe's response, "Oh why did you have to go do that?" That's how inured she is to being SWOCced. By which she meant...I guess you could argue that the text is making a metatextual argument about hermeneutics *as* rape, but yeah, nah, he fiddles the kiddles.
>>25596026If you think MD is difficult just wait till you get to Pierre
Get the version with the asteriks that explains the references, it's amazingly good then.
>>25596163/lit/'s annotation is singularly anti-racist and gay.
>>25596168>the chapter where ishmael goes on about the warmth hugs and strong arms of Queequeg is totally straight
>>25596171>men having sex with men is straightYeah, okay, I misspoke, that's totally straight. I fuck Maori every night.But fucking Maori is anti-racist, especially given that Ishmael is black.
>>25596026????you just read it?
>>25596026>>25596026Get yourself a Norton Critical Edition. The annotations help even a smoothbrain like me.
>>25596352Even the Penguin one has good maps and annotations.It helps if you have at least some sailing/skippering experience just to blend in more.
Reminder that Americans didn't like Moby Dick until everyone decided to pretend it was genius decades later. When it was reviewed in Europe it got an almost universally positive reception.
>>25596026>religious allegoriesJust look them up.>extremely denseIt's not, in my opinion. Reference an annotated version if some of his wording confuses you. powermobydick.com is good in a pinch>very meanderingYes; it's an indulgent book. You need to be in for the ride. It's a Hawthorne-inspired "romance", where painstaking detail is used to create a vivid stage for an emotional payoff or commentary on human nature. If you haven't already read it, The Scarlet Letter is a great read to temper yourself for this writing style.
>>25596364>It's not, in my opinion.Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.It's no Ulysses/GR, but it's not light reading by any means.
>>25596026it wasn't even the man's most popular novel at the time... Because it fucking sucks ass, and is gay.
