Moby Dick is coming to your town...

[Moniker]

Moby Dick is the best novel in the English language. If you find any part boring, you're doing it wrong. Some may find Moby Dick hard to read, but that's more just getting used to 19th century vernacular.

I rather wish that modernist lit had followed the Melville tradition (of course there was no Melville tradition until the '20s) instead of Joyce. Ulysses is undoubtedly a monument, just not one I care to sit and gaze upon very often, excepting maybe the Penelope episode. There's a point where complexity impairs readability, and then you start to lose emotive impact.

[xbl0x180]

I just saw that I wrote "Joyce would be to England," when the guy was an Irish writer. I seem to recall a list of some of the best works in English and Joyce topped the list

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0776722.html



Who IS the best writer from England...

[sjewkestheloon]

Read it fairly recently, last year I think, and I loved it dearly. Haven't tried any more Melville yet but I will try and make space for it. It is a book that refuses to be read quickly. You have to live and absorb the enormity of it. I was speechless by the end.

[CMoon]

I continue to be afraid of reading other Melville. Moby Dick undoubtedly owes part of its greatness to happy accident and aging like a fine wine instead of going rotten. No clue how the rest would fare.

[Moniker]

Haven't tried any more Melville yet but I will try and make space for it.

Melville wrote some great short stories, the best of which is Bartleby the Scrivener. High among the best ever written, and very readable. Billy Budd is also great, the staging of which is what prompted the Melville revival. Benito Cereno was his only widely read short story while alive (also amazing).

Among the novels, I'd recommend White Jacket and Typee (his first and only success during his lifetime) as followups. Also very readable. The Confidence Man is often cited as his best after Moby Dick, but the style is very dense and confusing. It's almost presciently modernistic.