From Moby Dick to The Shining

Moby Dick

I keep a copy of Herman Melville's enormous novel Moby Dick by my bedside.  I'm on page 143 (out of 582), and have been there for the past three years.  Whenever I can't get to sleep, I open the book to the chapter entitled 'Cetology' and begin to read:

"Though this fish, whose loud, sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among…"  (At this point, I'm asleep.)

It's not that I don't like wordy books.  In fact, I'm known as a pretty tolerant reader.  Over the years, I've wrangled my way through many Russian novels including Anna Karenina and (most of) The Gulag Archipelago.  I've also read English author A. S. Byatt's Posession, and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (including all those songs).  I can even read Joyce Carroll Oates' books past the point where most of my friends have already given up.

What's interesting to me is how much fiction has changed over the years.  Books like the Grapes of Wrath, with its intercalary chapters were popular when they were written, but they make modern readers want to move on to something else.

Recently, my teen-aged daughter told me that the Stephen King novel she was reading, Desperation, was boring.

"Boring?!" I said.  "How can Stephen King be boring?"  When I was her age, I'd been so terrified by The Shining that I hadn't dared leave my bed to use the bathroom and had spent the entire night with an overly full bladder.

"I don't know," she said.  "It's just that nothing happens.  It drags on."  She acted like she was being forced to read Camus in the original French.

I don't want to be one of those people who sit around complaining about how times have changed for the worse and kids today don't know anything, but I have to admit that the shift to faster-paced books is getting a little out of control.  A year ago, I sent a query to an agent, and the agent responded that my book started out too slow and wasn't 'kicky' enough.  I guess she never got to the school shooting on page two.

I like books that take a little time for the reader to get to know them.  I like a few sidetracks here and there to add color.  I don't mind waiting on for well-crafted plot to get moving.  I appreciate character development.

But on the other hand, I doubt that I'll ever get past the Melville's chapter on cetology.