/lit/ - Literature

>>6500807
(...) << I decided to go to the heart of the American classical canon and picked Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I was expecting a rip-roaring adventure on the high seas with adventure, atmospheric/moody descriptions, and a slice-of-life from a very specific time in American history.

<< I’m not the biggest fan of academic supposition so I tried to read Moby Dick as a novel; a straight-up, fiction story. It started quickly and got me hooked (see what I did there) but quickly turned into an interminable scientific description of EVERYTHING whales/whaling. I’m not talking about a few paragraphs talking about the size of a whale… I’m talking about chapters and chapters of whale physiological minutia. I guess this was necessary when it came out since very few people had actually SEEN a whale or were even aware of whale generalities… but I would say about 84% of the book was irrelevant scientific taxonomy. But, MAN, can I now tell you about whale skeletons and epidermal layers.

funthingstodowhileyourewaiting.com/2013/02/06/readin-the-classics-moby-dick-total-bait-and-switch/