I’ve read Moby Dick five or six times, and read the first eighty-odd pages of Gravity’s Rainbow twice. I don’t intend to try again, but you never know.
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Amateur. Proust wouldn’t have got halfway up the beach before being reminded of the smell of his grandmother’s socks, and you can forget about the plot entirely for the rest of that volume.
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Ever read Tristram Shandy?
Well the main character doesn’t even show up until about page 100 …
I think both novels wander off into episodes of pure fantasy that aren’t really there to drive the story, and part of the fun of GR is picking up on the obvious signs and is just going with the flow.
It’s perhaps not fair for me to pick on Moby Dick. Two of the times I attempted it were readings for class. The first time I just didn’t have time to finish it before the book report was due, so I switched over to the Cliff Notes.
Another of the times, I was reading it for a college literature course. We had an assigned number of pages to get through before every class, and then in class the professor would discuss them. Unfortunately, he spent a lot of time going into minute detail of the early chapters, so that those of us who were keeping up with our readings became further and further ahead of him. So I stopped reading to allow him to catch up. I missed one class and when I came back, he had jumped up to where we were scheduled to be. Suddenly, I went from being a hundred pages ahead to more than two hundred behind. So, I said to hell with it.
What can I say, The Whale tasks me…
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The only two people who have recommended to me that I read Gravity’s Rainbow were both self avowed schizophrenics who both said they had problems figuring out fantasy from reality. I took it as a sign that I’m better off just not reading it.
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I’m still trying to decide if you are neutral evil or neutral good.
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I’m pretty sure he’s pure neutral. He has interests orthogonal to politics, and only wishes destruction upon the enemies of his apolitical interest, and wishes the flourishing of the supporters of his apolitical sympathizers. Except political interests have grabbed onto everything before he could defend various concepts from politicization, and the ones he fought for all lost the battle, and have become too politicized for rationality. Ideas like anthropocentric climate change and global warming.
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I must be having a stroke…
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Not even wishing destruction, most of the time; only when frustrated with the hordes. Otherwise I’d be happy with quiet peaceful irrelevance.
People insist on politicizing everything. And then they wonder why we don’t have nice things.
http://www.mobydickbigread.com/
The best readers are not those perfect Brit voices but the sea captains who give it the proper flavor.
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