Moby Dick
"Command the murderous chalices! Drink ye harpooners! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to Moby Dick!" So Captain Ahab binds his crew to fulfil his obsession -- the destruction of the great white whale. Under his lordly but maniacal command the Pequod's commercial mission is perverted to one of vengeance. To Ahab, the monster that destroyed his body is not a creature, but the symbol of "some unknown but still reasoning thing." Uncowed by natural disasters, ill omens, even death, Ahab urges his ship towards "the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale."
Stats for nerds
116recommend
528mentions
436people
2007–2026years
27% recommend64% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I definitely get it not being everyone's thing. But I really really love Moby Dick. It is so funny! My wife kind of prepped me for viewing a lot of it as comedy or humor, especially toward the beginning, and viewing it through that lens absolutely helped. The language is old enough that you sometimes have to realize that the author is being funny, but it is there. I really loved all of the information about whales... that is just not true. Wasn't even thought to be true at the time.
- I just wanted to know what you guys have enjoyed recently, or really any book you'd recommend to the HN crowd. I've currently got:
- Metamagical Themas (Hofstadter)
- The Complete Books of Charles Fort (Fort)
- Heavenly Mathematics (van Brummelen)
- Plane and Spherical Trigonometry (Kells, Kern and Bland)
- Spherical Trigonometry with Naval and Military Applications (Kells, Kern, Bland)
- Moby Dick (Melville)
- John Updike. Better than average prose in all of his books, but his debut The Poorhouse Fair is outstanding. It may be too much for modern readers - not many explosions or super heroics - but even if you only get a chapter in, it shows what can be done with English.
Moby Dick is unexpectedly stylish. You'd think a story about a whale would be more genre-ish, but the writing is very fun.
Then there are heavy hitters are writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Wolfe, and Virginia Woolf.
James Joyce is the end level boss. Ulysses is readable, but by the time you get to Finnegan's Wake it's hard to imagine anyone getting more abstract.
- Oh that’s a great test case. I’ve been annoyed by the speed issue too. For a while I had json and Md files bound to Zed because it was faster with highlighting than anything else.
But even that takes seconds to start on my M1 Max from cold. So then I just wrote (avec Claude) a viewer app and it turns out computers are so fast you can not only open multi GB JSON files instantly you can even pretty print them so fast the user won’t lose attention.
But I just generated those. Moby Dick is a great real-world test case.
- I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or whatever in his novels.
- Moby Dick is often quite high on the lists of greatest novels of all time. It seems to me that all of that stuff you think is not part of the good novel trying to get out is part of why it’s considered great, not merely good
I rather take the tedious parts as Ishmael seeing the divine in the world of tedious particulars, although such kludgy pointers as me saying that destroy the real meaning, as the thing represented itself
