Comment on Calling all Dickheads!

chiliedogg@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• jqubed@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s one of the very small number of books to defeat me. The narrative part was okay but every other chapter was full of wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales and their lives and I just couldn’t take it.

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  • Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    wildly inaccurate “natural history”

    If you consider the fact it was written in 1850 it is surprisingly accurate, like it was talking about whales eating giant squids a century before the scientific community accepted that.

    Also the whale descriptions are the point, the book is about the enlightenment drive to understand and therefore master nature with Moby dick standing in as a refutation of that idea, being unconquerable no matter how much knowledge you have. Without the descriptions you could write off Ishmael and the crew as a bunch of idiots who just didn’t have the know how to take down Moby dick.

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  • tomiant@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales

    ngl I think I might find that interesting…

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• Vupware@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It is the book that completely changed the way I view literature. My favorite book of all time. It is beautiful, funny, bizarre, and tragic.

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• shittydwarf@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I was all aboard the Moby Dick train when I tried reading it, and yeah hundreds of pages about whale phlegm really did take the piss out of my vinegar

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• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You need to get on board for what is, at its heart, a blog about being a whaler in the 19th century. The story isn’t gripping in the sense of a two minute movie trailer, but it does draw you in and lead you to care about a bunch of the crew as it drags on. It is the quintessential “slow burn” novel.

  But it isn’t even the worst on that front. Any Brian Sanderson novel is going to have a similar “omg, is this going anywhere? And why won’t they just kiss already? Damn, now I know entirely too much about an obscure magic system methodology of turning whale cum into lighter fluid” element.

  One book I could argue genuinely reads better on audiobook when you’re stuck in traffic for two hours a day.

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• lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It is a page-turner; in fact it’s a banger. It’s an incredible book

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  • Objection@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Is there any way you can describe the appeal more specifically? I hated it but I’m trying to understand what people see in it.

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• antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yes. It’s probably my favourite book ever. No need for it to be a page-turner if each page is interesting by itself.

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• LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It was written & read back in the days when people’s favorite pastime was literature. Ain’t nobody got time for that now.

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