books you've had to stop reading

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Woebot, in light of your thoughts on Moby dick, what's your opinion of homophobic dancehall? Are the two equatable?

ps. Sorry if you have already addressed this before.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
So if it's literary merits are thin on the ground, it owes it's reputation ENTIRELY to unquestioning readers? This reminds me of Tolstoy's critique of King Lear. You happen to be the one reader who saw through the conspiracy.

As for likening it to Mein Kampf! Well, it's certainly an original opinion. At least I think it is. Nothing comes up on Google. Mein Kampf isn't held in high esteem as a work of prose. It's interest lies entirely in giving insight into the mind of Hitler. (But then, I guess you'd argue Melville is to whales what Hitler was to Jews.)

Anyway, I wouldn't attempt to refute your opinion entirely, as I only got halfway through lol Perhaps I need to read the cruel bits. I don't doubt your disgust, but I wonder if it's colouring your appreciation of its literary merits. And certainly most would agree it's hard going, even boring for long stretches. But then too, not many great novels are perfect. Dostoevsky's "baggy monsters" e.g.

I've never encountered the argument about it being cruel, actually, either. I find it interesting for that very reason. (The critique, is.)
 
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Leo

Well-known member
never finished don delillo's "underworld". i got all caught up in the critical acclaim when it came out, maybe i was expecting too much.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n21/jeremy-harding/call-me-ahab

This review seems to touch on the issues you've raised Woebot. Don't have time to read this evening but I'll read with interest tomorrow.

I'm intrigued by the fact that in this book of cruelty towards whales, the head whaler is a madman and the whale ends up winning. (Right?)

One issue in which Melville was ahead of his time was slavery, as evinced by "Benito Cereno". Although his can probably be read as a racist text, I rememeber it being more subversive and subtle than that.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The elaborate descriptions of cruelty provide the justification for the whales madness, its righteous fury. Amongst other things, the whale symbolises nature placing a limit on man's dominance, unwillingness to be exploited - an exploitation condemned by Melville, the murder of whales being "in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all."

actually you can safely ignore my comments in this thread and engage with droid's. He's more articulate and better informed than me. After all, he's read it!
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Woebot, in light of your thoughts on Moby dick, what's your opinion of homophobic dancehall? Are the two equatable?

Given the rampant homoeroticism in MD, I like the idea of the circle being completed by a dancehall tune that's anti-gay but also really pro-whale.

I'm intrigued by the fact that in this book of cruelty towards whales, the head whaler is a madman and the whale ends up winning. (Right?)

Only if you ignore the 'it was all just a dream'/'Ahab is himself a Replicant' interpretation.

But yeah, Ahab is hardly the 'hero' of the piece, is he? He's basically painted as a total nutter right from the start and his monomaniacal obsession with the whale leads to his own death and the deaths of his entire crew. It's hardly a moral manifesto for the wonders of killing large animals, at least I didn't read it that way.
 
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droid

Well-known member
i stopped reading it because of the cruelty. where the cruelty is pitched in that book - it's simply wrong. you can write about cruelty certainly - but it's where you place the reader that matters. you could write a proper book about whaling - but this isn't it.

i'm more than happy to judge people in a prior age. i'd say it's up there with that other "classic" mein kampf. moby dick is a throughly ignorant book.

its literary merits are reasonably thin on the ground too. ok, the introduction is breathtaking. but as soon as the boat sets sail melville spends the entire time letting the reader know how erudite and well-researched he is on the subject of whales.

this is a book which owes its reputation to unquestioning readers - and ultimately its attitude to whales is indefensible.

A cataclysmically, astoundingly (but entertainingly) bad opinion. Have you read Mein Kampf? This is like comparing Mozart to the vengaboys.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
 

droid

Well-known member
Given the rampant homoeroticism in MD, I like the idea of the circle being completed by a dancehall tune that's anti-gay but also really pro-whale.



Only if you ignore the 'it was all just a dream'/'Ahab is himself a Replicant' interpretation.

But yeah, Ahab is hardly the 'hero' of the piece, is he? He's basically painted as a total nutter right from the start and his monomaniacal obsession with the whale leads to his own death and the deaths of his entire crew. It's hardly a moral manifesto for the wonders of killing large animals, at least I didn't read it that way.

Ahab is a villain to rival McCarthy's Judge. If there is a hero it is Ishmael, or the whale itself.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A cataclysmically, astoundingly (but entertainingly) bad opinion. Have you read Mein Kampf? This is like comparing Mozart to the vengaboys.

Doubly ironic given Hitler's well-known love of animals and the obsessive greenness of the Nazis generally.
 

droid

Well-known member
One thing I will concede is that the encyclopedic detail of whaling practice is excessive and probably goes furthest to dating it - that said, Melville could write corporate brochures and Id read them for his prose alone.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Catch 22. Uylsses. Various Dickens. Gravitys Rainbow.

GR is a slog in parts, granted, but I was glad I finished it. I found C22 quite easy to read as long as I didn't try to keep up with all the hundreds of minor characters. Got a copy of U, not attempted it or any Joyce yet. Never read a word of Dickens but Mickey's Christmas Carol from Disney is an undeniable triumph.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
BTW, are we distinguishing 'had to stop reading' from 'basically couldn't be arsed with reading'?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've read 'Great Expectations'. It was worth it for the many long stretches of imaginative brilliance. Of course, Dickens is often sentimental/maudlin and the plot creaks under a surfeit of contrivances, but then he wasn't a 'realist' author, he is telling a fairy story of sorts. It's also another one of those 'baggy monsters', presumably because in Dickens's day, those novels were serialised, not intended to be read in one go.

Many, if not ALL, of the greatest books I've read have been boring or stupid in places, but masterpieces nonetheless. The novel as a form allows for this variation in quality. Whereas if a short story contains three or four pages of rubbish it can be more or less sunk.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Infinite jest was a slog.

I'm loving IJ, chipping away at it in what seem like infinitesimal (no pun intended) chunks - OK, slivers - of a few pages at a time every few days. It's by no means a page-turner but I don't find it a huge effort to read, either. I don't think it's anything like as textually dense as it could be, put it that way, given the level of technical, psychological, political (etc....) detail DFW goes into. He's even got me to care about the tennis stuff.

Corpsey: speaking of Dickens, does it seem silly or camp or whatever to the modern reader that he has all these characters called Mr Nastybastard and Mrs Drinksalot and that? I remember J K Rowling being particularly prone to this too.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It would be silly, were he a realistic author, which I suppose he is often seen as being, given his concern with the social issues of his day, but 'Great Expectations', at least, seems - as I said - to be a fairy story. I haven't read other Dickens novels, but I wonder if the reason this heightened reality works so well in 'GE' is that it opens with the viewpoint of a child.

I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine,—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle,—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

Just grabbed this example from page one of 'GE', the wonderful illogic of a child's mind. In fact, the whole book is in some respects rather childish, and Dicken's characters on-the-nose names fit into that. It reminds me of Roald Dahl's stories: Mr and Mrs Twit, e.g. And yes, Rowling, who is obviously very influenced by Dickens). The characters in G.E. aren't credible as human beings; they're as shallow, and as vivid, as cartoon characters.

Actually reading G.E. was a revelation in that I always thought of Dickens as a very dry, forbidding sort of author who wrote these 600 page doorstops about the workhouses. (Saying this, I've not read any Dickens since!)
 
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