Thoughts on Moby...

"Nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way." - Ken Kesey


I'm on holidays for 3 weeks. I could attempt reading it again. The last 3 times I tried, I got 100 pages in and died and it went back on the shelf. So do I try again this break? Too much whaling terminology...Too much biblical language....Too slow. But it is a classic. Between this and Karl Barth.... it might be a Bridge Too Far.


Burn brightly, Pete