Should I read moby dick? what am I in for?

tale of a whale

The ending passages of the first and last chapters of Gatsby are some of the best I’ve ever read, and I’m not American

>Queequeg will never caress you as you lie together in bed without a worry in the world

Attached: 1537186855262.gif (500x272, 1.17M)

Read A Confederacy of Dunces and The Things They Carried instead of those two and it's guaranteed you will have a much better time and be better off

Attached: 1548224087246.png (625x626, 17K)

Attached: moby-dick quote melville masks.jpg (1000x1250, 296K)

>what am I in for?
God-tier American literature. Not even joking. Just ignore the wale biology section.

american kids don't generally read moby dick in high school

american kids don't generally read at all

>ignore the wale biology section.
definitely do not ignore this section. there's a real function to the cetological aspects of the text.

a rollicking tour de force

>american kids don't generally read at all
they read just as much as yuro kids

>The Things They Carried
great rec, but if this thread gets any more traffic, expect ten (You)'s of pure hatred

"If his chest would have been a cannon he would have shot his heart upon it"
That's the only thing I know about this book, but it's such a great quote that it alone makes me want to read it

needs to be a harpoon

Indisputably the greatest aAmerican novel ever written and one of the greatest novels in world literature, right up there with Ulysses, Don Quixote, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov. Personally I put it on par at the top with Don Quixote, even Tolstoy/Dostoevsky/Joyce never created a single character as full of depth, humanity, and rebellion as Captain Ahab.

Context of quote?

>book is long so it must be good

Bad cover

> t.strawman

The literal GOAT

...or the best novel I ever read, anyway

Got 150 pages in and put it down for a while, I'll probably come back to it and finish it.

It's an interesting book, I dig it. There is a bit of pointless rambling here and there

An excellent essay on whaling ruined by fiction.

iirc Melville was payed by the word like most writers at the time so a lot of the pointless rambling is there as filler to give him a bigger paycheck.

mfw 80% of all the kids in my ap class didn't read any of the assign books, despite them all being incredible novels.

Why shoot *at* a cannon?
What does this even mean?

I finished it in the Yea Forums readalong of '17. I mean you should pretty much be hooked on the mad ride from the first sentence

bartleby.com/91/35.html

my fav chapter, there are no spoilers, read it and consider the whole book

Terrific book, one of the best novel ever written, but..... it's not for everyone. Read the first few chapters and if you are bored, the book isn't for you since its style doesn't really change. Personally, I love it. The chapters on rope and the minutiae of sailing are terrific.

Also, based Melville refutes the common scientific notion that whales are mammals:

> The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: ‘On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,’ and finally, ‘ex lege naturæ jure meritoque.’ I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug. 12
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old-fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold-blooded.

Attached: 127D92B2-5409-4461-BA70-CB2BAB810F29.jpg (348x499, 39K)

The word 'at' does not appear in the text user posted.

But anyway, it's a misquote.

>He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Reddit

Doesn't even matter that Melville is wrong on a lot of counts concerning cetology. It's his perception of the whale that matters; if it was all dry facts, it would add far less to the story. Not to say it would be worse if he was correct; just that it's not necessary.

what the fuck did you expect, they were kids after all, i didnt read those until being around my 20s

mfw 80% of kids at my top 3 ranked uni barely skim the reading for a given seminar