Moby Dick

Today I commence the reading of Moby Dick which is 726 pages of old english and whaling. Oh and lots of detail. If there's one thing I've learned from American Lit, it's that classic authors adored writing about detail and using several different ways to describe one thing. On one hand, it's sometimes lovely to have various things so described and played out before you. On the other hand, when a book is so full of detail on every blessed subject it covers, well...it might just get tedious. {It does makes it easier for a book to turn movie though}.  I have four weeks to read Moby Dick... but I think I shall find it more interesting than The House of Seven Gables {by Nathaniel Hawthorne} which I just finished. Oh and if you see me in the next four weeks, chances are, you might just see me with my nose stuck in the midst of Moby Dick's pages. And what a book to carry around! I suppose there had to be a big book written about a big whale {however fictitious}. A small one just wouldn't do.;)

Melville included in his book extracts from books of the time which had snippets or lines on the topic of whales. These were gathered for him by one sub-sub librarian and he wrote a note about said sub-sub librarian in preface to the extracts. {Which I will include below...it's quite humorous!}
So here's to challenging books, sub-sub librarians and detail. Lots & lots lots of detail!!

"It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cytology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird's-eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought,fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness--Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains yet take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye forever go thankless! would that I could clear out Hampton  Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hi aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out this seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together-- there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!!"
- Herman Melville