There are some books that everyone knows something about, that somehow become more than books. Ulysses, A la recherche du temps perdu, Moby Dick, that sort of works. Books I’d like to have read just to know what all the fuss is about.

So I started reading Moby Dick through the ingenious DailyLit which sends you great works, in daily email snippets. Moby Dick comes in 252 snippets.

The first 50 snippets or thereabout were “normal” literature. At first I thought it seemed like a reasonably interesting book, even though the tone was a bit peculiar. And then it got strange. And then it got positively bizarre. But not in a good way. I was prepared for lots of talk about whaling and sea-faring, but that’s not what I got. But instead, Melville pontificates. And he rambles. And he lectures. And yet he manages to say nothing at all.

I am sorry to say that I gave up on the book after having read about a third of it, and will never try to read anything by Melville again.

The first third (or thereabouts) of snippet #69:

CHAPTER 35

The Mast-Head.

It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head came round.

In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her – say, an empty vial even – then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.

Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians.
And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.

He manages to write 400 words saying just about nothing at all. Was he paid by the word? And those 400 words make up 8 (yes, eight) sentences. Just look at those sentences! More semicolons than you can count, and parenthetical asides that add nothing to the content, and all of it as bombastic as it could possibly be. Did he not have an editor?

“Let us in some measure expatiate here” perfectly describes the whole book. And honestly I cannot understand why anyone would want to read this.