Daniel > Recent Status Updates

Bit of a bad streak with my reading lately. Need to pick a winner next, one of my reliable authors, I think.

The old, "it's not cheating on my wife if it's with a MAN" play. 31 going on 13.

still reading this too, to my surprise. if Melville was as dumb irl as he is in this book he'd have fallen off a damn boat somewhere and died before he could ever write anything.

Thought about dnf'ing, but read a couple more chapters. why? idk. I can't imagine you could make a book on octopuses any less interesting than this if you tried. f'ing field journals of coordinates and measurements would be more exciting. less than 100 real pages to go... hmmm

Ok, now I want to read the more Ishmael-Queequeg focused earlier draft of Moby-Dick. :/ There are little moments of interest that are keeping me going so far, but from a strong start this has devolved into mostly cringe. Fictional Melville is flailing about like a middle-schooler with their first crush, and rather than suspense it's more apprehension as he barrels from one incredibly bad decision to the next.

Reading more Moby-Dick because everything else I am "reading" is just blah.

the next chapter is called "Hawthorne's Package" 😏
so far it's not bad.

randomly starts reading professionally published Melville/Hawthorne rpf 🐳

Wow. I read this whole thing for that sad excuse for an ending?😒

An encounter has occurred. This is not exactly action packed.

Know what would have been better than paragraphs of incoherent descriptions? A picture. That said, I had no idea morays could do that knot thing. This continues to skate along the border of dnf. I probably should.

This is so weird.

Back to this, I guess. Not loving the writing style.

Fantastic writing, but feels a more distant than I'd like, despite the first person.

I'd be further, but after one chapter I had to stop and google henry james gay.

Noah's employees should unionize. Give your assistant manager vacation days, and f'ing talk to Patty. Seriously, dude running around sticking his nose into murders but can't bring himself to ask his employee/neighbor a simple question.

Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, deeper and deeper into the Tun [...] several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a queer accident happened.
Nothing gay here. No sir. This is a 100% heterosexual novel.

I don't understand why I'm reading about potential part time employees. Well I mean I assume one of them will provoke an insight into the case, but ffs stop yanking my chain w Patty and Leon.

SO much better than Vertigo. :) Should have read this as soon as I got it.

Some skimming may have occurred.

what do you know he's finally talking about actual octopus stuff. fyi I'm much farther than it seems, cuz the text ends at 67%. thanks to the one guy who mentioned the first third was a snooze fest but it got better after that.

This is so much better than anything else I'm currently reading it's sad.

Content Free. Memoir style, but tells us absolutely nothing about the author. Occasionally mentions octopus, but certainly not focused on them or anything else. Heading for a dnf if things don't improve soon.

Ah, we're using the war to explain the time jump. Ok.

As someone immune to the WWII obsession that infected hetero US males of the late 1900s, I'm baffled by the setting here. There's a war on. I assume WWII, but the action is thus far all in Paris and there is zero mention in any context of Germany/Nazis, etc. Wikipedia suggests this would make it late 1939 or early 1940. I guess this would be obvious to French readers in 1954 when published? Just, WHY choose this?

Ishmael managing to be simultaneously horny and racist while waxing philosophical about his matrimonial bond with Queequeg.

I was not expecting the memoir or Alaskan history aspects. That's not bad, but the ratio of octopus to non-octopus content so far is a bit lower than expected.

Having a hard time suspending the old disbelief with this one. 😒

MC is not exactly the picture of mental health, and seems not to have been so even before the traumatic, PTSD inducing event that lead to his leaving the police.