I done did it, I read another book! I stuck to classics again to better my chances of not hating the experience. But the choice was blinded by the ebook format, which does not give you a chance to weight the amount of paper you’re about to tackle. I read Moby Dick, inspired by a comic I read (Achab by Patrick Mallet, meant as a prequel) which made me curious about the real book. And it’s a big book, the contents of which are very dense. Since I only seem to find time to read at the tail end of a day, my mental energy is usually depleted which makes it hard to go through more than a few pages. But it kept me coming back, which is saying a lot about its quality. Once I got used to the unusual words and turns of phrases it got easier, the same thing happened with the Grapes of Wrath. This is making me realize my English is lacking a certain range, it’s a struggle to grasp older turns of phrases. I wasn’t particularly apt with the seafaring vocabulary either :).
The book with very rich with many references, most of which I didn’t know, which left me wishing for annotations. It describes the world of whaling very, very, VERY, exhaustively. It can sometimes be a little much, some of the encyclopedic indexing of whale types, and bones were very dry. But it has the merit of not making assumptions about what a reader may know about a world which no longer exists. These details give texture and meaning where imagination couldn’t fill the gaps.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, I understand why it’s a classic. I liked understanding how a world once worked, I liked the characters, the metaphors are inspired, and a few sentences are so salient with meaning as to give one pause.
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