23 Jul 2008, Posted by Cat in News, 17 Comments. Tagged reading, writing
Thar she blows!
What better way to spend an evening than sitting in the bath reading The Making of a Sailor or Life Aboard a Yankee Square-Rigger by Frederick Pease Harlow, circa 18-something or other. I can’t think of one, which gives you a pretty clear picture of the sort of life I’m leading this year. When not reading in the bath by candlelight, I’m ploughing my way through Moby Dick on audio book, a free download from Librivox, where you can get lots of fab storytelling to stuff onto your ipod.
I’m loving Moby Dick. I’m not sure what I expected, but I sure didn’t expect to like Ishmael as much as I do. Most folks I know who’ve read the book say they found it a total bore. I’m thinking its cos they read it as part of a higher education experience, a process which can suck the funk out of anything. I’m reading, or rather, listening to it because I reckon I ought to have read it if I’m gonna be writing a novel featuring sea serpente hunters, which is pretty much as good a reason as any.
17 Comments
July 23, 2008 2:34 am
benpeek
maybe the audiobook is way different to the book itself, which i found overly long and rambling and just tedious in places. i wasn’t in high school when i thouht that, either.
July 23 2008 02:35 am
Cat @
Its definitely long and rambling... but in a gorgeous way. I'm 24 chapters in and they haven't seen a whale yet. The fellow who reads it has a very engaging voice, which helps.
July 23, 2008 2:37 am
murasaki_1966
I like Moby Dick, but Ishmael annoyed me from time to time.
Some other titles that might be helpful are:
Two years before the mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,
from Wikipedia
On the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter he describes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs, and the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew. In White-Jacket, Herman Melville wrote, “But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana’s unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast. But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle.”
and
By way of Cape Horn by Alan John Villiers
July 23 2008 02:38 am
Cat @
ooh! Ta! I shall see if I can find it
July 23, 2008 2:40 am
battblush
I love Moby Dick. It’s a brilliant, claustrophobic, muscular, terrifying epic, and I’m always so enamoured of Melville’s willingness to depart from the narrative entirely in order to spend chapters describing the non-fictional aspects of the whaling life– descriptions of whales, equipment, boats…. it wouldn’t have a chance of publication today, becuase it breaks so many of what we take to be the basic rules of novelistic narrative, and yet I find it utterly compelling to read– hard work, sure, because it’s so dense, but immensely rewarding.
Lee, dressed as Lyn for work avoidance purposes
July 23 2008 02:51 am
murasaki_1966 @
A lot of classics would not get published today: Rememberance of Things Past aka In search of lost time by Proust, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, and one of my personal favourites, Such is Life by Joseph Furphy. All these books are dense, but intensely rewarding. You've gone up in my estimation, Lee.
July 23 2008 03:13 am
Cat @
absolutely agreed. Rob tells me that such books are where people used to learn stuff before the Internet. There's a whole chapter devoted to how nice it feels to be in a warm bed when its cold outside!
July 23, 2008 7:14 pm
clockworkquill
…sigh… I second Mr Peek: tedious by my post-high-school standards. I am intensely intolerant of technically (meaning technique-ly) out of date writing. I find it hard to see past the flowers and solitary musings. I haven’t enjoyed many of the classics, and figure that with my life being only so long, I don’t want to spend it missing all the stuff that the people who are alive right now are producing.
July 23 2008 20:44 pm
Cat @
out of date writing
see, I was with you here all the way until a couple of years ago when all that "out of date" stuff suddenly took on new meaning. The fact of something being named as a classic means nothing to me - I've always had very populist tastes and like what I like regardless of what anyone else might think of it.
Its not possible to read every worthy book produced so we all have to pick and choose. I'm doing my selecting from up and down the timeline is all. Got a stack of books penned by people 'alive right now' on my table too.
July 24 2008 01:00 am
Cat @
also... reading older texts such as Moby Dick or Pride & Prejudice is kinda like immersing myself in a fantasy novel. My real life and Ishmael's/Elizabeth's will never cross paths. There's not much practical difference between a whale and a dragon to a middle class, forty-something urban person such as myself. Both protagonists inhabit worlds I will never see.
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