I'm looking for advice on Hispanic lit.

First you need to decide what you mean by Hispanic: Spanish language? Spanish language diaspora? Latin America? Central America/Caribbean? Hispanic American immigrants & their descendants? If something is written in English by an American is the subject matter enough to make it Hispanic? I'll even give a complicated suggestion which points up some of the problems: Los Bros Hernandez' Love and Rockets series. I don't think there's much doubt that it rises to the level of literature, but while Gilbert's Palomar stories are an easy sell as Hispanic, what about Jaime's Hopey and Maggie stories? They are Latinas (Esperanza and Margarita) living in Southern California.

I read Moby-Dick as a junior in high school and haven't read it since. Perhaps it's a book that just doesn't do well when the only time you read it is in high school?

Perhaps it's a book that just doesn't do well when the only time you read it is in high school?

Probably true unless it grabbed you immediately or you were lucky enough to have a teacher (or someone) tell you, "No, it's not you, the book is really really weird. You may not be getting it, but even if you are it's still weird. 30 pages of whale-related quotations, a narrative that stops and starts for the first 500 pages, lots of arcane digressions, more hoyay! than you can shake your Angel DVDs at, Melville's peculiar sense of humor, formal experiments. Some people find all that too off-putting, but if you stick with it and take it on its terms, get into its rhythms, it's pretty great. Odd, but great."

Jim, this may interest you.

Moby Dick is up there with Ulysses in the category of "Books Required for College Classes that I Suffered Through." But, they are both trumped by Fielding's Tom Jones, which is the only one in the category of "Books I Dropped the Class Rather Than Read."

One of the few books I've never attempted. After Infinite Jest, anything should be easier, though.

Any Buffistas read it?

Me me! I love Moby Dick to bits. Yes, I agree, Jim, that its a huge influence on that whole generation of metafiction writers that Pynchon belonged with. Particularly, as you note, the multiple voices, examining the subject from 8,000 angles, scholarly, mythically, dramatically (love the little play in the middle, love the freakass sermon at the beginning). There are obvious elements of Medieval Romance in it too.

erika, it's not a particularly difficult read as long as you understand going in that big chunks of it are essentially non-fiction reportage about whaling. Which (I think) is essential because once you are steeped in that world, the metaphors became much more complex and rich.

So I'm about a third of the way through Moby Dick....

Any Buffistas read it?

Ahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!

I'm not laughing at *you,* Jim. Just the question. Because answering it seems to get me in all kinds of trouble.

So in answer to your question, I will just say: yes. I have.

I've read "1000 Years of Solitude"

Ten times better than One Hundred Years of Solitude.

While I was reading Moby Dick, I heard someone on the radio read his favorite passage out loud. It was a stirring and beautiful. I had just read that passage myself a few days before and gotten not nearly as much out of it.