/lit/ - Literature

>>16587806
Moby Dick, same reason as you, more or less.

I'm not American, so I didn't really know much about it before going in, and only started reading it because my grandfather had a very old edition on our attic and I didn't have anything better to do at the time. I was pretty young and had only read YA garbage by that point, so it was the first "real" novel I've ever read.

I was expecting a linear plot, the one everyone knows at this point because of cultural osmosis. Dude goes into a ship, meets a captain, they both go and hunt for a whale, things happen as a result, right?

The very first chapters hooked me like nothing else ever had up to that point. Ishmael's thoughts on why he was setting out for the sea in the first place, how it felt to get paid, why going in an excursion as a sailor was infinitely more rewarding than being a passenger, despite being forced to do arduous work when doing so.

But what really got me was the chapter where he goes into the chapel and hears the priest's sermon about Jonah and the whale. I had never been religious before then, despite being raised in an catholic household, but his re-telling of the story, mixed in with the lesson about how you should properly take God's punishment, affected me on a fundamental level.

>For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.

I know it'd be impossible because of the linguistic barrier, since most people in my country don't really speak english to the degree needed to read Moby Dick, but by god, do I wish it was mandatory reading here like it is in the US.