A-hunting we will go
By Dylan on April 17th, 2015Posted In: News
Let’s give the lads a break from their troubles and check in with some of the least chatty members of this story, shall we? If you’ve forgotten, Agata is Milena’s little sister, and Emil here is her pet wolf. Or maybe she’s his pet human; nobody’s quite clear on the matter. Either way, they come as a set.
After months of chipping away at it I finally finished Anthony Trollope’s gargantuan six-book Palliser series, a true doorstop of late Victorian literary achievement. If you have any tolerance for 19th century British social literature, the series is really interesting; the books cover the 1850s through the 1870s or so, and on the fringes of a lot of political, societal, and familial drama you get to watch amenities like trains, telegraphs, and speedy transatlantic travel wend their way into daily life.
Next on my reading list is Moby Dick. I have a black-and-blood-red version of Tom Neely’s wonderfully distressing Moby Dick print on my living room wall, and it’s been taunting my ignorance for years!
Ah, Moby Dick is a tremendous book. It’s like a layer cake of metaphor and symbol.
The edition that I own includes a number of literary papers on the book, written over a number of decades, which I think is a nice bonus.
The biology is all terrible of course, but that’s to be expected.
And after having read it twice, I still can’t decide what Melville really thought of whaling.
What he thought of people however, is pretty plain, IMO.
When you read the novel, there is an entire chapter on the rigging of the ship. You can safely skip that part as it is quite tedious to a non-sailor. I think he threw it in there to show off that he knew rigging.
I disagree heartily. All the apparently “non-story” chapters of the book (and there are rather a number of them!) are clearly there by design, and I do not believe that design is to show the reader how much he knows about lines, or boats, or the mass slaughter of whales.
To skip them is certainly a decision that the reader can take, but it is not what the author intended. They all contribute to the narrative and the myriad points of the novel in their various ways.
Turnshoes? Aw, Agata, those can’t be fun to tromp through the snow in.