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.

In his writing books John Gardner talks a lot about the shear majesty of Mellville's prose.

Personally, I am love the fact that Mellville made his living with risque islande-exotique potboilers. Also that he lived in Manhattan.

Also, I love that Nabokov wished he could have seen the night that Melville visited Hawthorne and arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm looking wild, wet and biblical and scaring the hell out of Mrs. Hawthorne.

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."

I've tried all 3. Couldn't finish Ulysses. "Finished" Moby Dick, if you can call skimming-the-last-600-pages-in-a-day reading. Loved Tom Jones the second time around, once I got some grounding in English of the pre-20th century variety -- it's actually pretty racy once you let your imagination fill in the gaps left by Fielding.

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

Heh. I had the same reaction.

It's on my list of things to pick up, and the comments I'm reading here are actually making that more likely than not. So, um, go y'all.

I really liked Moby Dick. I read it for my American Lit class in college, which was focused on captivity narratives. Strangely enough, my favorite parts were probably the long digressions, because, as Hec points out, they deepen the metaphors. "The Whiteness of the Whale" is fucking brilliant.

I have not read the whale book. I should. I've read other Melville.

I liked Billy Budd. I might have to revisit MD, just to give it a read outside of the classroom requirement.