13 thoughts on “Pandemic Reading”

  2. Harsanyi is a fool.

    He totally misunderstood the opening of the book that he writes about…

    NO…. Ishmael did not go to sea because other people were insufferable. This is wrong:

    “It wasn’t “Call me Ishmael” that hooked me — a line so recognized that we might forget its efficient genius — but rather the pessimistic humor of Ishmael informing the reader that he sought the shelter of the high seas because his fellow human beings were becoming insufferable. ”

    Ishmael went to see because it was a deep dark November in HIS (Ishmael’s soul).

    Herre is what Ishmael said:

    ” It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly, November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily passing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet….and so on”

    1. The Ishmael opening was boring, boring, boring. You have to know how to hook the reader. A much better approach would start with:

      “So there I was, two harpoons in my back, blood in the water, a peg leg stuck in my teeth, sailors screaming for dear life, and Helen was 800 miles away, munching giant squid off the coast of Bali.”

      Now the reader is intrigued. What led up to this odd and chaotic situation, and why isn’t Helen with Moby Dick? There’s a reason the book isn’t called “Ishamel.” Nobody cares about him, least of all the great white whale (who is totally not racist even though he’s white, but that’s something the reader will wrestle with as the book relates Moby’s childhood fling with a randy beluga).

      1. “We were somewhere around New Bedford on the edge of the ocean when the drugs began to take hold….”

      2. In this, the time of the Chinese Wuhan Red Death, I have had occasion to return to certain of my languishing projects. One is that novel I’ve been working on since…well, I think since Carter was president.

        George, you seem to have a flair for this sort of thing. I shall post here what I’ve written so far. Perhaps you, or someone else, could help me finish it. So here I go:

        “It was a dark and stormy ”

        That’s as far as I’ve gotten.

    1. Are you talking about “In the Heart of the Sea,” by Nathaniel Philbrick? It was published in 2000, so it’s more or less impossible to compare it to books written and published in the first half of the 19th century. Dana and Melville were eyewitnesses, not historians.

  4. Another great eyewitness-class book is the novel “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” by Capt. Sir Frederick Marryat, published in 1836. Compared to the literary novels of the era, which often read like bad translations, it’s in an extremely modern and straightforward style, and is arguably the beginning of the popular “costume sea stories” genre that continues to this day. Marryat had been a Royal Navy captain in the Napoleonic Wars.

    The book also speaks to the politcal shading of our contemporary world. Easy’s father is a socialist philospher, who raises his son not to believe in private property. Easy joins the Navy and sees the world, in the company of a black sailor named Mephistopheles, and gradually changes his mind. It’s a lot of fun.

  5. I read MOBY DICK a couple of years ago when I gave myself the assignment to finally read the big “lap-buster” classics I had never gotten around to reading. I don’t know why–except perhaps an interest in the authorial process–but what initially hooked me was the theory that Melville had originally intended the main character to be, not Ahab, but a character named Bulkington, who is mentioned in the early part of the novel and who then is dropped.

    I found the novel tough sledding. It held my interest for the first 125 pages or so but then I got into those chapters dealing with the nuts and bolts of whaling. I find characters more interesting than try-pots. But at least those chapters were so well-written I could stay with the book. Then in the last 100 pages or so, as Ahab closed in on the white whale, the pace picked up, thank God, and I was able to finish the book.

  7. “[T]he intolerable whininess of The Catcher in the Rye”

    A-men! That’s part of the unholy trinity of high school reading assignments that discouraged me from liking reading. Holden was crass and unlikable from the first page, and even as a teenager I figured that he didn’t know what he was talking about when he rattled about phonies.

    One of those other two books is The Great Gatsby. I have yet to reread as an adult; teenage boys aren’t exactly the target audience for an introspective tale about useless rich people.

    Then there’s A Separate Peace. It is a train wreck slowly advancing toward a big ugly melodramatic confrontation that the reader knows is coming but can’t escape because of [expletiv]ing compulsory education. Maybe Holden Caulfield had that reading assignment.

  8. I thought Holden Caulfield was just a whiny prep-school boy whose experiences had no bearing on mine.I went to a working-class public school in a time a place where things were a bit different. “Portnoy’s Complaint” had some relevance. (Raw liver?! Why didn’t I think of that?) Then, a little later on, a quip by Bobcat Goldthwaite took over: “Boy, when you see that pussy, those Star Wars bedsheets will go right out the window!” Let the preppies and phonies worry about each other. I was busy elsewhere.

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