Wow, so many typos in today’s post, including Melville’s surname! I hope no one saw it.
📚 Books 2026, 18: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Took me a few months to get through this, and with a couple of interruptions — actually three. Why the interruptions, given I really enjoyed it? It’s a dense work, if not fantastically long at some 530 old-school paperback pages in the Penguin Popular Classics edition I have. Sometimes I felt like reading something a bit easier.
Which suggests it’s hard work, for which it does have a bit of a reputation. But actually it’s mostly not. But that ‘mostly’ goes to the heart of what’s so fascinating about it.
Mention Moby Dick to most people and they’ll think of the eponymous white whale and the infamous monomaniac Captain Ahab. Which is fair enough. But most of the book is not actually about Ahab and his obsession or quest at all. There is one early scene where he insists the whole crew take an oath to hunt the titular whale as their highest priority — it chomped off his leg, and he’s out for revenge, after all. But before that, and for much of what follows, Ahab hardly features in the story.
It’s the last fifth or so, maybe quarter, where he comes to the fore and we get the real hunt for Moby Dick.
Most of the rest — by far the bulk of the novel — consists of Melville’s, or the narrator ‘Ishmael’s’ — disquisitions on life, humanity, philosophy, religion, the sea, sailing, and of course, whales. ‘Call me Ishmael’, though, that famous opening line:1 it tells us we’re getting a first-person narrative. Which is true in part.
But it isn’t long before Ishmael — or Melville — sets that aside and tells us what’s going on in another character’s head. And then we’re off to the modernist, if not postmodernist, races, because this book cheerfully switches between first and third, turns into a play script or a dictionary, and generally uses any writerly techniques of Melville’s/Ishmael’s choosing to say what needs to be said.
It sounds, and could be in hands of a lesser writer, chaotic. If a first-time author today submitted such a manuscript to an editor — or to a friendly writers' group — they would be advised to go back and decide what one type of thing they wanted to write, and to focus on that. And watch their persons and tenses.
Here, though, it feels to me incredibly modern; almost avant garde.
It was published in 1851.
I loved it.
And not to forget: it’s also very funny in places.
Its major flaw is its total absence of women. There are no female characters at all. (Maybe a proprietress of a boarding house in the earliest, land-bound chapters.) Which is not surprising given the environment in which it’s set.
Another oddity to me, and I plan to look this up, is that one chapter lists and describes the forms and habits of the various types of whale. But the blue whale, which I believe is still the biggest, is not mentioned. Is it possible the species was unknown to whalers in Melville’s time? That seems odd. Moby Dick is a sperm whale, which to Ishmael (and the other Nantucket whalers) is the king of the beasts.
Also you’ll often see the title rendered with a hyphen, as Moby-Dick. I don’t know why, as the whale is always named without it, and the edition I have doesn’t hyphenate the title, so that’s how I’ve presented it.
I’m off now to read lots of articles about it.
-
Not strictly the opening, as it’s preceded by many quotes — some real, some I fancy, invented — about Whales and whaling. ↩︎
John Gruber may not be a mainstream journalist, in that he’s an independent writer, not employed by a large publication; but this retraction of a recent article is an object lesson in how to behave when you’ve published something incorrect. Even if, as in this case, you’ve been misled.
Watched: Spider-Man: Brand New Day 🎥
This was great! I think it’s the best of the Tom Holland Spideys. Marvel movies seem to be back.
Getting rid of teachers because we all have chatbots is like getting rid of doctors because we all have the plague.
Cory’s latest is very good on good and bad uses of LLMs, and why discernment is key to using them well.
I need to excise the word ‘though’ from my vocabulary, like I’ve just had to excise several instances of it from this morning’s post. It is clearly my most overused word.
📚 Books 2026, 17: The Three Eyes of Evil, by AE Van Vogt
I read this from the Balloch library several times when I was (much) younger. I really liked it, as proven by the fact of my repeated borrowing. Then the other day Warren Ellis mentioned getting an old book off Ebay, and this one popped into my head: could I get a copy of it, after all these years?
I could, and for only a few quid with the postage. It was soon here, and I read it over the weekend.
It’s not a novel, but rather a collection of two novellas: ‘The Three Eyes of Evil’ itself, and ‘Earth’s Last Fortress’. Neither title makes much sense. That is, they have only very tenuous connections with the stories. In the first, an accident leads a man to discover he has a third eye. This freakishness makes him somewhat cut off from society. Then, in conjunction with relaxation exercises designed to improve his vision, he discovers he can drop into another world, a parallel Earth. But it doesn’t make him evil. In the other world everyone has three eyes, and there are good and evil people, and people in between.
The second also concerns humans travelling by means of mental powers, but through time (though there is some sense of parallel worlds here too). There is an existential threat, certainly, but no actual or metaphorical fortress.
The powers brought on by the three eyes and the relaxation in the first was as much as I remembered of the whole book. I recalled liking the first story a lot more than the second. This time they were about equal.
Van Vogt was very interested in the idea of the supposed untapped potential abilities of the human brain and nervous system, here and in various of his other works. Which essentially makes these stories fantasy, not SF. Because what is psionics but magic with a different face?
Which is fine, but what of the stories? Van Vogt, it seems to me now, could tell a pretty good one from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. But he wasn’t great at overall plotting, at least as evidenced by these two. There are jumps of scene, of events, that don’t really follow from what has gone before. It’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with another editing pass or two, though.
His characterisation is much more limited. These are short works, so you might not expect too much development, but really there’s not a lot of character at all. I was pleased to find the second story has a woman as the lead, at least.
Other than that it’s all very much of its time. I’m glad to have read it again, but I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, except to aficionados like me.
Watched: Babylon 5: The Road Home 🎥
This animated sequel-of-sorts to the wonderful Babylon 5 TV series was released a few years ago, and I somehow missed out on the news. Heard about it a few months ago and was reminded again yesterday.
It’s good enough, but mainly for the chance to spend some more time with beloved characters. It doesn’t add anything to the overall story, nor detract from it. One for the fans.
The most intriguing thing for me about this alternative way of looking at The Great Wave is that I had never before realised there were boats in it!
Here's the original (first photo) and flipped (second). The idea is that since Japanese is read right-to-left, English speakers accustomed to left-to-right reading should see how it looks flipped, where it looks more like the boats are heading into the intimidating waves.
Watched: Billion Dollar Brain 🎥.
The third Harry Palmer film, and considerably more bizarre and confusing than the the first or second. Also a Ken Russell film, so that’s probably why. A mad Texan oil billionaire with a private army tries to trigger a third world war, basically
That BBC self-ad at half time of the World Cup Final was OK, but Mitch Benn did it better years ago with ‘I’m Proud of the BBC’ (YouTube link).
📚 Books 2026, 16: Use of weapons, by Iain M Banks
In which I interrupt a major work to reread a favourite (again), this time inspired by a podcast.
I have no idea how Dave Winer comes to this conclusion:
One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer.
Especially when one of the main things people (at least non-programmers) tout it for is doing your writing for you!
Watched: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 🎥.
I was sure I hadn’t seen it before, but I remembered some scenes as they happened. I have a vague memory of a DVD in a holiday house, perhaps. Partial falling asleep may have been involved.
It’s daft but fun in places.
📚 Books 2026, 15: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
I interrupted Moby Dick because I had a hankering to reread Illuminatus!, which by measure of number of reads must be my favourite book. I blogged about it in 2018 and 2015.
Endless fun, if you’re the type of person that a) rereads books at all, and b) likes spoofs about world-controlling conspiracies that are written in a breezy style that will have you in the mind of a squirrel in Central Park in one sentence and of a hippy journalist in Mad Dog, Texas the next. (I checked: sadly, Mad Dog, Texas is not a real town, though there is a ‘British pub’ called Mad Dogs in San Antonio.)