Moby Dick

Finally! I've been reading this book for a long time (over a month, I think) and I'm finally finished! I am excited to finally be able to start reading something else.

This book was long. I guess that six hundred and twenty five pages isn't as long as the works some of you are reading, but it was much longer than what I have grown accustomed to. Also, it was slow. Long and slow isn't a very good combination. The language was flowery, which at first was interesting but eventually just became tiresome. There are entire chapters of descriptions, and the lack of action for long portions of the story made reading it seem boggy.

Plot summary: Ahab (the captain of the ship and central character), before book begins, loses a leg on a whaling voyage. His leg was bit off by Moby Dick, a particularly identifiable and malicious whale. After recovering, Ahab madly goes off on another whaling expedition with the purpose of hunting down and killing Moby Dick. This is skeleton of the story that the book covers, narrated by one Ishmael.

After reading this book I know much more about whaling. I didn't realize I was lacking this knowledge, but it is interesting to have now. For instance, whaling is the origin of the term "There she blows," the cry of the lookout when a whale is spotted spouting and a term I have heard a lot throughout my life in completely unrelated situations. Whaling seems quite barbaric, but in the nineteenth century whale oil was used for everything from fueling lamps to coronation anointings and was relatively essential. One whale would require a huge amount of effort to capture and would provide a huge amount of oil. I wonder how whale populations were affected by this hunt, but I don't imagine that the majority of whales were in danger of being harvested. (Maybe I'm wrong - maybe a demise in populations are the reason we no longer hunt whales.) However, once the whalers stripped the whale of its blubber (which was then boiled down into oil), they would dispose of the rest of the carcass. This seems wasteful - like killing elephants for their tusks - and leaves me opposed to whaling.
I recently went to Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump and learned about the Native buffalo hunts. It was interesting to compare that practice with what I had been reading about whaling. In lean times the Natives used every part of the buffalo they killed and let very little go to waste, but it sounds like during times of plenty they too would only harvest the choice parts and abandon the rest. The Natives would kill entire herds of buffalo at one time - hundreds and hundreds would be led off high cliffs to their death. That seems worse than killing one whale at a time. Still, buffalo populations remained stable until the advent of Europeans brought increased demand and a feeling of sport to the hunt.

Many aspects of the book seem incohesive from beginning to end. Moby Dick is not spoken of for the third half (or so) of the book, and he does not actually appear throughout until the final three chapters, which feels like a lot of waiting for the title character. A strong friendship is developed in the beginning of the book that is then barely mentioned throughout the rest of the book, which made me wonder why they bothered creating it at all. The epilogue was really good in explaining the narrator's forgotten presence at the end of the story and how he was able to narrate it, however, and I admired that.

Despite my complaints, I'm glad to have read this book because it is considered such a classic. (Wikipedia calls it one of the greatest novels in the English language, and reading it gives me another check mark on my list of Penguin's Top 50.) One of my older coworkers who saw me reading Moby Dick on my lunch break mentioned to me how he had been required to read it in school, which seems pretty typical. That makes me think about the changes in education over the last fifty or a hundred years. I never had to read Moby Dick in high school, and I don't think my classmates and I would have done very well at it if we had been required to do so. Yet students used to be assigned Moby Dick in one class, and learn Latin in another. Nowadays I think we have changed our educational focus in two ways: we place more emphasis on sciences and math (parents look at their children's homework in these subjects with surprise and ignorance, and exclaim that they never had to learn such things), and we learn what is useful instead of what is classical (like Spanish instead of Latin).

Starbucks is named after the first mate of the ship in Moby Dick (a fact confirmed by Wikipedia)!