re moby-dick and melville...
if anyone can be arsed, i would recommend going through a few more of his books - i read omoo recently and it's a good way in to Moby-Dick I thought. Cos it's basically straight ethnography, or very good documentary style observation of his adventures on Tahiti. But not a lot else, there's not really much deep characterisation, certainly no sense of character that you get in Moby-Dick. So it's like he developed a bit. The odd passage has that revelatory/preacher type transcendent quality tho, like his rhapsody on coconut trees
which i copied out
Cos I think Moby-Dick is elevated to classic status, so everyone reads just that, or maybe they'll also read Bartleby the scrivener, but his other novels are good too and give you a sense of the wider picture. He's just describing so much stuff all the time. I love it. Will probably read Typee which is the other Polynesian one. And Billy Budd is meant to be good as well.
And I like his writing generally, but I do understand that it's a bit odd too. kinda dense. But I just fell into it at a certain point, where you live with the characters and get to know their quirks and ways of speaking, you are inhabiting the same world as them. Same thing happened with Ulysses.