/lit/ - Literature

>>16825512
Read the book.

cum

>>16792963

>>16825610
this unironically, ishmael loves him some sperm

>>16825563
Its so long though. I want to make sure its time well invested before I commit.

>>16825512
It's unbelievably gay, but it's also a great book. It's like Shakespeare or the Bible in that it contains a great many stories and meanings together

>>16825808
Gay how?

If it's "like the Bible" then that doesn't sound too good...the Bible is pretty awful stuff.

Because straights don't realize its about gheeeeey sex. It's meme tier. Whole chapters on Cetology.wtf. Great cover variants, though. You didn't fall for this meme, did you anon?

>>16825813
cringetard

>>16825512
". . . By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense. . . ."

>>16825813
Cringe. It's gay in that the main character Ishmael describes himself as married to a muscular black man and there's near constant homoeroticism among the seamen. The Bible is great and you're a pleb

The prose is beautiful, complex, and subtle, it's laden with unpretentious riffs on philosophy without being overbearing, and it distills the archetypal journey of man (to conquer his enemies) without reducing it to handholding or facile or unrealistic fantasy nonsense. The mutts who can't stand chapters on pure information, which is there to give context not only to the book but to Melville's life and views, are the same shaggy flea-ridden dogs obsessed with "number of pages read per day"; in short, they're the retards who read to say they read because they don't know how to extract and apply meaning from art without a tour guide. I have no doubt that you would gain little from reading Moby Dick, OP, in the same way you would gain little from Synecdoche, New York, or Wild Strawberries, or Hamlet, or Renaissance paintings. It's okay if you're not an adult able to take things seriously, so just focus on reading what YA fiction pamphlets help you in your daily life until you can graduate to more serious works. Good luck.

>>16825884
Why the fuck did you cut off the conclusion of that paragraph? It's one of the best parts of the whole book

>>16825894
Unbelievably based

>>16825512
Because it's America's best novel and this board is 80% yank.

>>16825828
>Because straights don't realize its about gheeeeey sex.
That's good though.

It's old, and therefore good.
Older = gooder.

>>16825894
Harry Potter was better in my opinion

>>16825900
I googled the coral phrase since that’s what is burned into my mind the strongest and the first website that came up cut the quote off there

>>16825794
>Its so long
No it isn't

>>16825891
What makes the bible great? I've tried reading it but quit as I didn't see the point. It's like reading a fairy tale made up by sandniggers.

>>16825944
Read the King James Version, put down your fedora for the time being and just enjoy it as a novel and as poetry. If nothing clicks with you and you take nothing away from it you’re probably literally mentally ill or intellectually challenged.

>>16825944
Don't try to read through the whole thing at once. If you like prose, read Genesis and Exodus, then skip to 1 & 2 Samuel. If you like poetry, read Job and Isaiah. Just appreciate the language and ideas even if you don't agree with them. Also you're even more cringe than I thought if you don't appreciate fairytales.

>>16826014
I like some fairytales, I just didn't think the ones in the bible were that good. I much rather preferred the Poetic Edda for example. Much better stories and better philosophical stuff.

>>16825997
That's exactly what I tried to do. I actually wanted to become Christian, that's why I read it. I really wanted to understand Christianity. But it didn't convince me of anything, only that God (as described in the old testament) is a selfish being.

>>16826050
>>16825997
>>16826014
There was a complete lack of spirituality.

>>16825894
Holy fucking based

>>16825512
>I see Moby Dick always rank as #1 according to this board. But what exactly makes it such a masterpiece?
It ranks #1 on this board because it’s a great book in a language that everyone on this board reads, there are very few books as good as Moby-Dick written in English, Moby-Dick is almost certainly not the greatest book ever (though it is my favourite), but it’s probably the greatest of American literature, and also one of the best in English. At least /lit/ puts Moby-Dick at the top rather than a meme boon like IJ.
>Is this one of those works where you are "supposed to" say it's the best, but nobody really knows why and nobody actually enjoys?
No it’s genuinely great. I read it because it was in the house and someone on /lit/ said it was comfy; I expected a decent work of literature that I enjoyed because of maritime setting and the whales but wouldn’t be the deepest thematically and would be a bit autistic. I was surprised because it was incredible, beautiful in composition and meaning, people complain about descriptions of whaling but Melville’s prose is vibrant enough to make it interesting and the activities are all related back to the themes of the work. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months after I first read it so within a year I read it twice again.
>It was poorly received when released, and according to most reviews from casuals readers, it's long winded and extremely boring.
Casual readers will not enjoy moby-dick, it’s not a book you should read slowly and it requires some prior knowledge about philosophy, the Old Testament, and history to fully appreciate. You can appreciate and even love the book without that knowledge but normalfags won’t get it when Melville makes a joke about whales liking Spinoza or spends a chapter critiquing pantheism. It’s far from dull (it’s even quite funny occasionally) and it’s long but not long-winded, chapters are fairly short and it’s quite varied.
>What is so deeply profound about this book
Exploration of a search for an ultimate singular truth or meaning to reality, and how that search (especially particular methods of going about it) is often destructive and futile, about the joys of the human experience and the openness of reality to interpretation. However there are many interpretations of Moby-Dick (appropriately for the interpretation that I gave you) and so you should derive it yourself, it’s one of the greatest things about it.
>that makes it the best book ever written in human history?
As I said, it’s not the best ever, it’s just one of the best in the only language that everyone on /lit/ speaks.
>Is it the story?
Yes, if you see the story as the story of the narrators exploration of the human experience, which is the point of the book.
>Is it the use of the English language?
Yes, Melville was incredible at poetic prose.
>Is it some profound meaning or revelation?
Yes, a number of them as Moby-Dick is open to interpretation.

>>16826491
Thanks, great answer. Will give it a shot then!

>>16825512
I hate those fucking book covers so goddamn much.They're ugly as shit and look like they belong on a first grader's textbook. If there existed a book with all the secrets of the universe, contained the perfect philosophy, formulated the universal equation for sentience, and was signed by the Lord himself, but it had one of those fucking covers, then I would sooner stitch my dick to the bottom of the ocean than hold that goddamn book.

It's a solid 8. Has too much verbose descriptions like where Melville just jerks off over ship anatomy. When at times he could've said something simply, he decides to hide his sentences with too much unnecessary language

>>16826706
No problem, I hope you enjoy it, but if you don’t love it don’t feel bad about it. Remember to take it slow though, pay attention to what’s being said, I’m sure you will but one of the main ways that people end up getting filtered by it is if they speed-read and don’t pay attention to what’s being said, only trying to garner narrative, it’s why casual readers and teenagers who get it assigned don’t like it very much.
>>16826747
Based aesthetic anon
>>16825691
This. “A Squeeze Of The Hand” is one of the gayest things I’ve ever read.
>>16825891
Queequeg is not black, he’s Polynesian

>>16826747

>>16825894
based and, dare I say it, redpilled?

>>16826806
filtered

>>16826871
Autism

>>16826858
Whale mouth looks kinda retarded, but I actually like this cover. I would never read a book from someone named Herman (one of the most incel names I can think of), but if it had this cover I would take another look at it.

>>16826923
This is one of the potential covers for the lit collab

>>16825894
Positively based, sir

>>16825813
Lol, imagine not being able to respect the Bible because of your hatred for your pure and perfect heavenly father.

>>16827119
It looked dumb at first, but it's growing on me. The more I look at this whale, the more I like it.

>>16825563
this.

>>16825813
>Gay how?
It’s gay in that it’s utterly homosocial, with a minor female character at the beginning and some brief allusions to women back home but once the Pequod casts off there’s No Girls Allowed. Manly men doing dangerous manly things together in Victorian America, forming deep affectionate bonds that were accepted at the time. Of all the hostile criticism dumped on Melville I don’t ever recall him being gay bashed. It looks screamingly obvious to today’s reader but his contemporary audience didn’t care.

>>16830351
They're on a whaling ship, you utter tard, of course there are no women.

>>16830442
Yeah, I know, which is why Melville isolated his characters there, and ackshually, there were instances of the captain’s wife coming along for the voyage.

>>16830442
Most ships brought wives and kids with them dumbass. It's not obvious that there are no women on the Pequod