Moby-Dick: Final Thoughts

So, it's done.  I'm finished.  I've completed Moby-Dick -- that is, if you count listening to an audiobook the same as reading a book.  To be completely honest, I would say I read about 30% in combination of print and online, and the other 70% via audio.

Anyway, this book really was not what I expected at all.  I really thought there would be more action, more adventure.  I didn't expect non-stop action like Treasure Island or even The Three Musketeers, but I was expecting a little more adventure, for a whaling novel.  There was much more description about whales, and whaling, and butchering whales than I ever expected.

Maybe I would have liked it more if I owned this beautiful Penguin Clothbound Classic!

Overall, I really wish I understood this book better.  Listening to the audiobook certainly made it easier in some ways, especially because I could absorb a little at a time, but sometimes I felt like I was losing the narrative thread (such that it was) since I only listened to a few pages a day.  After a break, I want to read Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick to see if that sheds some more light.  Parts of it were funny, and I really liked Queequeg -- I wish the book had had more about him.  I'm really not even sure what happened to him, though I have my suspicions.  I admired the writing, I appreciate the risks that Melville took, but I'm not sure that I can say I actually liked it.   And now I really want to go on an ocean voyage -- I'd love to go to Alaska now and do some whale watching! 

I'm glad I finished it, and I'm counting Moby-Dick as my American Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Austen vs. Dickens: two of my favorite British authors.  It was a tough choice, but I've finished all of Austen, so I chose Dickens this time around -- nothing against my beloved Jane, but I'm trying to work my way through the Dickens canon.  For this edition of the Classics Circuit, I'm reading my tenth Dickens novel:  Dombey and Son. 

(Crickets chirping).

Yes, Dombey and Son : one of Charles Dickens' classic novels. . . . the one that nobody's ever heard of! Because, honestly, nobody ever reads it anymore!  Compared to Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and even my beloved Bleak House, Dombey and Son is one of Charles Dickens' least read works.  Even Hard Times is more popular.  I suspect people read Hard Times because it's Dickens' shortest novel, though I personally think it is the least good of his novels.  My library system -- which includes more than 1 million items --  does not own a single copy of this book.  Not one!  Along with Martin Chuzzlewit (the one where the main character goes to America) and Barnaby Rudge (the one about "the Riots of 'Eighty"), Dombey and Son belongs to the trio of works which are probably only read by the hard-core Dickens fans.  

Anyhow, for those of you who are not familiar with the story, here is the setup, without spoilers.  The novel begins with Mr. Dombey (the father), holding his new baby (the eponymous son); sadly, his wife is dying in childbirth. (Mr. Dombey's sister explains it's all the wife's fault, "because she wouldn't rally" -- i.e., she didn't have the character not to die.  Riiiight.)  Dombey has another child, a daughter,  named Florence, about whom he could not care less; his hopes and dreams are all pinned on his son Paul, who will grow up and take over the family business. Mr. Dombey is some sort of business magnate, so little Paul has some big shoes to fill.  

Needless to say, things do not work out as planned regarding his big plans for his beloved son.  I don't want to give anything major away, but basically, this novel is about Mr. Dombey's relationship (or the lack thereof) with poor Florence, who essentially fills the role of the orphan in this novel.  As you may remember, there's an orphan in every Dickens novel, or someone who is had a terrible childhood without loving parents, if you haven't noticed this already.  

Apparently, this is Dickens' attempt at a feminist novel, though I wouldn't say he's really promoting the rights of women as far as work or property are concerned.  Poor little Florence is rejected by her father at every opportunity, and it seems like he goes out of his way to get rid of anyone who might show her affection, because he's aware of what a jerk he is and he doesn't want anyone else to show him up.  Dickens does make a point about the sad lot of marriageable women.  [Mild spoiler alert!]  

For example:  Mr. Dombey is looking for a second wife and he's courting a beautiful widow, Edith, whose mother is one seriously manipulative gold-digger.  The fact that Edith and Mr. Dombey don't really love each other is irrelevent.  Edith has spent her life looking for husbands and not for love, and she blames her mother:

"What childhood did you ever leave to me?  I was a woman -- artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men -- before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. . . . There is no slave in a market: there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and paraded, Mother, as I have been, for ten shameful years," cried Edith, with a burning brown, and the same bitter emphasis on the word.

As usual, Dickens fills this book with minor subplots and eccentric side characters, which sometimes disappear for hundreds of pages at a time.  I really wanted to like this book (which I admit I haven't finished; I have about 250 pages to go), but I don't think this is going to rank near the top with my favorites.  I'm finding it terribly uneven -- some parts are just great, and I could easily read eighty or a hundred pages in a day, and some parts dragged glacially.  I found the parts about the wretched Mr. Dombey to be just depressing and rather boring.  Dickens seems to go out of his way to show that Dombey is a cold, heartless, bastard, but after a while it got tiresome. Things really perked up when the fun supporting characters were in the picture, but I've always found them to be Dickens' best writing.   I haven't given up on the book yet -- I'll stick with it to the end and see if it gets better.  Florence may be one of Dickens' typical ingenues, but I do find myself caring about whether or not her story is going to have a happy ending. 

UPDATE:  I did finish the novel, and the ending was extremely satisfying, so I'm really happy that I read it.  I wouldn't rate this novel in the same tier as Bleak House or Oliver Twist, but it's still a good read and worth sticking with if you're a Dickens fan -- if you're new to Dickens you might try another one first.  But it's still a good book overall.

Short vs. Long Books

Lately, I've been beginning to wonder if my brain is shrinking.  Well, not my brain exactly, just my attention span.  It seems like I can't focus on any book longer than 300 pages.  I don't know if it's just a phase, or a summertime thing (though I didn't have any heavy reading in the two classes I took this spring), or just Victorian overload.  But for the past couple of months I've just shied away from anything that looks long or heavy or the least bit challenging.  I keep hearing about how the Internet is causing everyone to have shorter attention spans.  I've been reading Chekhov stories for my upcoming Classics Circuit posting, and I can't even read more than a few of those in one sitting.  I am concerned.

I looked at my Goodreads list of the books I read in 2009, and it includes  some real whoppers:  Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, Vanity Fair, Wives and Daughters, David Copperfield, An American Tragedy, The Woman in White.  Plus several long contemporary books, like The Book Thief.  This year so far I've only  read two books longer than 500 pages, Native Son by Richard Wright and American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.  Both of them were actually really fast reads.  The longest Victorian I've read this year is Oliver Twist, and that's less than 450, and I did a lot of it on audio -- and it was a reread.

I've noticed this years' reading includes a lot of juvenile books (mostly award winners), short stories, and novellas.  Is this just a phase, or should I be worried?  I have a separate tag on Goodreads for Big Fat Books, and more than half of the books on that list are unread -- more than 50!  My own to-read bookshelf has quite a few chunky books, mostly Victorians.  I have several Dickens still unread, and almost a whole shelf full of Trollope.  (Trollope published more than 40 works in his lifetime, so I'm not holding my breath to finish his entire oeuvre. )  And there are all of those Russians waiting to be read -- I haven't even touched Dostoevsky.  I'm not even thinking about Proust, or A Dance to the Music A of Time, which is close to 3000 pages over four volumes.  

It's not as if I've never read any long books.  Some of the longer works I've read include Roots, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, and Anna Karenina. Heck, I've even finished War and Peace.  (Okay, I admit it -- that was for college, and it was basically the entire reading list for my Tolstoy class.  And, um, I never did read the last 50 pages.  In my defense, the actual novel is over, and that's really a sort of afterword.)

So, is it just me?  Is it just a phase, or should I give up and just read graphic novels for the rest of my life?     Maybe I'm just getting myself intimidated, and I should blindly choose something and just stick to it until it's done.  Or else just give up and read long trashy books instead.  One of my online book groups just selected The Brothers Karamazov for the July read.  I've heard it's very good, and a group read might actually behoove me to finish it.  Maybe I should just start Moby Dick, which has more than 100 chapters, which are very short.  Ships! Whaling! Ahab!  What could be more different than being landlocked in Texas during a broiling hot summer?  Depressed Russians and lots of snow, or an insane ship's captain?

Bloggers, help me out.  What big fat books do you recommend for summer?  Alternatively, what's a good fast summer read?  I need suggestions, and encouragement.