Am I just a brainlet or is Moby Dick really a struggle to get through? I'm only about six chapters deep, but god...

the whole scene where theyre eating the clam chowder is really great

I got hard when Quugueg buttfucked him

It's one of those classics where if you're not until it at the beginning you might not like the rest. Have you read in the Heart if the Sea yet?

One of the most comfy scenes in literature. Also has one of the few women in the book.

I wanted to emphasize "sometimes" when it comes to the diction. Because there are great, beautiful passages, but the book, especially when it begins to meander and ramble, sort of loses the imagery in my head and my eyes begin to glaze over the page.

I love reading literary canon, and it has been a fine enough motivation for me so far. I think those sort of hypotheses should form naturally as one reads. Also, do not take my struggles as boredom or disinterest. I consider reading works like these a broadening, educating experience that lets me enter a time, culture, and mindset I would otherwise have no opportunity to experience. I wish to get the most out of the book as a possibly can, and I simply wonder if the density of the prose is prohibiting me from fully enjoying it's scope more so than the average modern reader.

I have not. Also, I'm not entirely sure what your first sentence is saying.

>tfw to come to Veeky Forums in the current year is to see millenial pseuds bashing, belittling, and berating the all time great works of literature

Where has anybody in this thread bashed the book?

The diction and rambling is the best part, just come back to it

Don’t be such a cock about it... obviously we realize it is a miracle of a work, but anything that divine should challenge the brain. Help your brethren by adding something useful.

Not exactly true.
Wait until Ahab shows up. His speeches and the whale-hunting scenes are some of the most exhilarating passages I've ever read. Wait until the White Whale becomes more important in the narrative. Among other things Melville was a master at building suspense in an ebb and flow that trends upwards until the climactic final chapters of the novel.

He got paid by the word.

Not in the case of Moby Dick (which wasn't serialized), but some of his contemporaries (Victor Hugo) were indeed paid by the word.
Anyways I hope you're not >implying that Moby Dick is excessively long. Not enjoying the cetalogy chapters is the mark of a pleb. Ishmael fucking LOVES whales, and you can see it in how devoted he is to describing every aspect of whales.

>be brainlet STEM in college
>take american lit
>never read any of the books but actually read through moby dick
>try to marathon the last bit before the final
>don't read the last 50 pages
>that's what the essay prompt was on and when everything wraps up in massive action packed whale fight

i do recall enjoying it quite a bit but i'm so mad about that test 10 years ago i don't know if i can ever go back.

It's difficult.

It's also totally worth it.

The first pages are comfy, how could you find those hard? What's hard about the book so far?

>I selected a short paragraph at random from the book.
To je fair, this paragraph is one of the more famous ones

>sort of loses the imagery in my head
Books aren't movie scripts. The idea isn't to read and to make a bunch of moving images like a movie. Not to say that you don't also do that sometimes depending on what's happening but a lot of great books will have parts, even lengthy parts, where nothing physical is happening and there is nothing to visualise.

It's a natural reaction, especially today when media is shortening attention-spans. Nevertheless, if you persevere, you'll both be rewarded with reading a great book and a great story, and probably increasing your attention-span and vocabulary along the way.

I think it was just a matter of adjusting myself to the author's style. It isn't that I was finding the book hard, I was just frequently losing concentration and my sense of the physical narrative.

I have no problem with reading abstracted, non-physical elements of a narrative. I think it was moreso with how Melville weaved the physical story within Ishmael's internal one. Sometimes I'd lose track of where one starts and the other ends.

Keep at it, the scenes with Ahab and Co. make it all worth it

Ishmael describing the pleasure of a frost-tipped nose, while under warm covers, and pitying nobility's inexperience of such pleasure.

Since this is a moby dick thread, can we talk about how intensely homo Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg is? Almost every interaction of theirs is basically an antiquated "n-no homo" moment

>is melville gay?

The first few chapters of Moby Dick are hilarious.

Sod off

Sorry, I'm straight. It's not you, it's me. Really.

It does have some beautiful passages, and the first hundred or so pages were quite engaging, but it loses it's momentum soon after that and the ending was shit.

As a work of literature it has some value. As a story, it's shit.