In my Norton Critical Edition, chapter 1 is 5 pages long. I hope that length seems manageable to you all. And by the way, I rather doubt that Paul will actually want to read this book, but I'll keep you posted. Maybe knowing that the opening sentence is one of the most famous lines in literature will pique his interest. He likes celebrities.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
So, chapter 1 of Moby-Dick: "Loomings." Before we even get there, Melville makes us wade through a map, an etymology ("supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school"), and several pages of quotations about whales. Myself, I'm thinking of treating all of these options as I would the map--that is, referring back to them periodically rather than dutifully absorbing them now. Maybe you'll take a different route. But anyway I hope you'll notice who gets quoted on the title page. More Spooky Book Fates: if you've read Tracing Paradise, you might remember that I've written about this Leviathan myself.
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4 comments:
Hi Dawn, I interested in joining this reading group because I love the idea of reading MD and GE together. Are you going with one chapter of each a week? Do you "lead" the comments via your blog? Teresa
Hi, Teresa! [Hey, for everyone who doesn't know her, Teresa is another CavanKerry Press poet as well as a Frost Place devotee.] Regarding the reading project, this is our second attempt: our first was Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale." This time, through a scientific process of trial-and-error shillyshallying, we've managed to come up with a plan to read the two novels alternately. So this weekend we're starting with "Moby-Dick." Next weekend I'll toss out a non-expert remark about the opening chapter, with hopes that the rest of the readers will start chattering to each other about what they're noticing, avoiding, puzzled by, overwhelmed by, etc. I hope to be more of a timekeeper than a leader per se.
Sounds great, count me in! (I'm disappointed that I missed Winter's Tale...it's my favorite by S.)
Okay, I guess I am in. This feels a bit hard. But since both books are available on the internet I can always dip in for a second at work, even if I don't read in the traditional way with pages, just screens. I wonder if the "old" versions of Dickens and Melville will be significantly different. We shall discover.
But first I have to plan how to travel to the west coast and not get sucked only into family adventures, nor feel as though there is some huge whale to conquer.
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