Upon reading Moby Dick..again...kind of

I'm close to done with Moby Dick. I've been reading it for my American Novel class and it's been interesting. I read the condensed version of it when I was in middle school. It was one of a series of great books my parents had that were about a hundred pages each with half of those pages being pictures. I also started reading the book once for fun only to have school start again. These previous reading have made reading the book this time strangely familiar and foreign. It's odd though, the book begins much like a Dickens novel: long drawn out descriptions and next to no plot movement. About a hundred pages in the book shifts to a long series of essays on various whale related subjects mixed with a few whale hunts. This apparently switches back to a narrative for the last hundred pages.

The book is completely different in its structure than I expected. The odd thing is that in many ways it mirrors the structure of The Things They Carried. If you're unfamiliar with the book, it's a series of short stories about Vietnam, war, and human behavior. I highly recommend it. It is considered a ground-breaking choice of style that is absolutely necessary to in O'Brien's words "tell a true war story." It's fairly amazing to me that Melville did this long before O'Brien and yet Moby Dick is considered an awful book by so many people. In fairness, O'Brien has a much easier to read style.

All of this has lead me to wonder how popular any book really is and how we actually gauge that. I suppose the simplest way to do that would be sales, but that doesn't account for checkouts from the library and borrowing books from others. If my class is any indication, it seems like Moby Dick is a member of the literary cannon despite a strong dislike from the general populace.

Basically I think I like books that many people find unpalatable. I'm not sure whether that's because I want to like the "classics" so I can feel intellectual superior or because I genuinely like them when they're actually terrible books.

Mostly I'm just writing to try and get in the habit again.