• jqubed@lemmy.world
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      9 days 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.

      • tomiant@piefed.social
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        9 days ago

        wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales

        ngl I think I might find that interesting…

    • Vupware@lemmy.zip
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      9 days 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.

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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        8 days 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.

    • shittydwarf@piefed.social
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      9 days 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

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      9 days 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.

    • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

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