2021 Here We Come!

 

2020 was the year of many things. Some planned and expected, like the War and Peace chapter-a-day readalong. But many things unexpected and impossible to plan for as well. 

Who knew that Plague-Lit would become a thing? 

Or that I would waste one whole perfectly good reading month by feeling weird and distracted about a certain virus to the point of being unable to read or blog or focus on anything productive except for another 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle!

How can 2021 possibly compare?

2021 will still be a year dominated by Covid-19 - it's not going anywhere in a hurry folks. Any new vaccine will take time to get out there and there are no guarantees about mutations or other unknowns. I cannot see any overseas travel on our immediate horizon. Even inter-state travel is fraught with uncertainty and quickly changing border rules.

2021 is looking like another quiet, stay-close-to-home year. Which is perfect for tackling some of those reading projects I've been meaning to get to for ages.

Therefore 2021 will be Project-Read-My-Own-Books (PRMOB).

A number of possible reading challenges have already come to my attention and I am creating two of my own.

1. The Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall Readalong: Feb - May 2021
2. The Edith Trilogy Readalong: Oct - Dec 2021

Nick @One Catholic Life is once again hosting his now-famous chapter-a-day readalong. This year we are reading several different books to make up the 365 chapters. 

The schedule looks like this:

• The Divine Comedy: January 1 to April 10 (100 cantos, or chapters= 100 days)
• Quo Vadis: April 11 to June 23 (73 chapters and an epilogue = 74 days)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame: June 24 to August 21 (59 chapters)
• David Copperfield: August 22 to October 24 (64 chapters = 64 days)
• The Three Musketeers: October 25 to December 31 (67 chapters and an epilogue = 68 days)

I only own two of these books -The Hunchback and DC. Which is perfect for filling in the gap between my two proposed reading projects! David Copperfield will be a reread, but since I last read it in 1988, I'm sure it will be like reading it anew.

Nick is also about to embark on a 4 year odyssey with lucky Jack Aubrey aboard the HMS Surprise. Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series, or the Aubreyad, is one of my all-time favourites. I first read the series around 2003, when the movie starring Russell Crowe was released. It took me several years to complete, finishing with a huge nautical themed party hosted by my book club! (The series was not a group read, but each meeting, for about three or four years, I began with my Jack update. We all felt it was worth celebrating, with a big HUZZAH, at the end.)

I have no idea if I will be able to keep to Nick's schedule and read the other stuff I want to read, so I will pencil the books in for now and cross my fingers!

What does my reading year ahead look like?

A little like this.

December 2020:

• Tarissa @In the Bookcase: A Literary Christmas 
• The Tailor of Gloucester | Beatrix Potter (1902)
• Christmas at High Rising | Angela Thirkell (2013 - a collection of stories written during the 1930's & 40's and published together for the first time by Virago)
• Plus a few assorted Christmas cook books
• CC Spin #25
• My Love Must Wait | Ernestine Hill (1941)

January 2021:

• First Book of the Year with Sheila
• Master and Commander | Patrick O'Brian (1969)
• Bill @TheAustralianLegend and his Australian Women Writers Gen 3, Part II Week, 17-23 Jan
• The Pea-Pickers | Eve Langley (1942)

February:

• Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel (2009) | reread

March:

• Post Captain | Patrick O'Brian (1972)
• Bring Up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel (2012) | reread

April:

• Zoladdiction Month with Fanda @ClassicLit 
• The Sin of Father Mouret | La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875)
• 1936 Club with Simon & Kaggsy, 12 - 18th April
• All that Swagger | Miles Franklin (1936)

May: 

• The Mirror and the Light | Hilary Mantel  (2020)
• Liz's 2021 Anne Tyler Reread Project
• The Accidental Tourist (1985) 

June:

• For Lisa's Indigenous Literature Reading Week in early July 
• Benang | Kim Scott (1999)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Alexandre Dumas (1831)
• HMS Surprise | Patrick O'Brian (1973)

July:

• Paris in July with Tamara
• A Maigret or two
• Liz's 2021 Anne Tyler Reread Project
• Ladder of Years (1995) 

August:

• The Mauritius Command | Patrick O'Brian (1977)
• David Copperfield | Charles Dickens (1850) | reread

September:

• Liz's 2021 Anne Tyler Reread Project
• Noah's Compass (2010)

October:

• Desolation Island | Patrick O'Brian (1978)
• Grand Days | Frank Moorhouse (1993) | reread

November:

• AusReading Month
• Dark Palace | Frank Moorhouse (2000) | reread
• Non-Fiction November
• Novellas in November
• German Literature Month
• Margaret Atwood Reading Month
• Hagseed (2016)

December:

• Cold Light | Frank Moorhouse (2011)

January 2022:

• First Book of the Year with Sheila 
• The Fortune of War | Patrick O'Brian (1979)

The Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall Readalong: Feb - May 2021

• I read Wolf Hall in 2011 and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012.
• 2021 will make it nine years since I read the first two books. 
• Before reading the final instalment, I want to revisit the first two, to refresh my memory and to see if I still love them as much as I did the first time. 
• I would be delighted if anyone would like to join me on this journey back in time to Tudor England.
• #WolfHallReadalong2021

The Edith Trilogy Readalong: Oct - Dec 2021

• I first read Grand Days and Dark Palace in my late twenties and adored them, particularly Edith and everything about her.
• I reread GD in 2006 and sadly found that somehow Edith and I had gone our separate ways. 
• The books ended up in the big book cull of 2007 as I prepared to move from the country to the city.
• But then in 2011, Moorhouse published the final, long-awaited book in the trilogy and I knew straight away that I wasn't done with Edith after all.
• This trilogy has been patiently waiting to be read complete since 2011.
• If you have a hankering for the League of Nations or would like to read a book set in Canberra and the ACT for AusReading Month, then Cold Light is the book for you!
• Who's in?
• #TheEdithReadalong2021

#PRMOB

#AttackMyStacks

The Illustrated Golden Bough | Sir James George Fraser #Readalong

Given the ridiculous amount of books I have on the go at the moment, the idea of starting yet another, seems rather ridiculous. But I struggle to pass up any opportunity to join a readalong at the best of times, but when it also means reading along with Jean and Cleo, then how could I possibly resist!

Jean @Howling Frog is hosting the spontaneous readalong in question. Part of the appeal is the lack of firm reading dates. Jean and Cleo plan to read 2-3 chapters a week, however my edition is The Illustrated Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. It's not only full of pretty colour pictures, but it's also the abridged version with only 221 pages (plus indexes).

First published in 1890 in two volumes (then three volumes in 1900 and finally a whooping twelve volumes in 1906-15), my one volume edition was published in 1996 with eleven chapters. Which means that my edition does not have the chapter on the crucifixion (that Fraser removed from subsequent editions after being criticised for including a Christian story in his comparative study of myths and pagan rituals and religions). A disappointing fact, that may lead me to search out the missing chapter online somewhere, to round out my reading journey. 

(I have found the Project Gutenberg ebook here).

I've now had The Golden Bough lurking on my bookshelves since the year 2000. I started reading it back then, but my interest fizzled out part way through. I'm hoping that Jean and Cleo can help me finally finish this book.

Frazer was born in 1854 in Scotland. He was a social anthropologist. His work describes the three stages of human belief from primitive magic to religion to reason & science. He said,

Books like mine, merely speculation, will be superseded sooner or later (the sooner the better for the sake of truth) by better induction based on fuller knowledge."

His critics were not only upset by the inclusion of the Christian story, but one Edmund Leach, "one of the most impatient critics of Frazer's overblown prose and literary embellishment of his sources for dramatic effect" said that,

Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here, there and everywhere, to illustrate propositions which he had arrived at in advance by a priori reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence!

Frazer was a social anthropologist interested in speculative human psychology; Leach (1910-1989) was a social anthropologist interested in functionalism and kinship structures. As Frazer predicted, his ideas were superseded by newer, modern methods of reasoning and science. Many of Frazer's ideas may now be outdated, but the conversation had to start somewhere.

I'm curious to see what he has to say. 

As a frustrated amateur anthropologist from way back, I feel that I should warn Jean and Cleo that I'm about to enter into a topic and subject matter that I have been known to obsess over ad nauseam. Blogger beware!

My first caveat is that I'm not always convinced by the idea of continual progress dressed up as a positive forward march for all humankind. Evolution, change and adaptation - yes, by all means - but it's not necessarily superior or better; it's just different - a sign of modification and acclimatisation - not ascendancy. 

My other bias is that I view all religion as part of our human urge to create a life narrative - a story that seeks to satisfy our need to ascribe our lives with a higher meaning and purpose. We're all looking for something bigger than us, something to belong to that gives our lives significance. 

Thousands of years ago, the gods inhabited the heavens. They were powerful, unpredictable and not of this earth. Then, curiously, within about 500 yrs of each other, the main civilisations on this planet at that time, all grew tired of these distant, uncaring, demanding gods and turned to something, or someone closer to home. Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad changed the spiritual narrative into a more personal one. It became a story about people, here on earth, with human frailty and flaws as well as the potential for goodness and kindness and altruism. 

Some wonderful stories have grown out of these traditions, but so too, have many poor ones. Ones that no longer serve us well. In the end, though, it's whatever works for you. You have to find the story that gives your life significance. Just don't try to convince me that your story is somehow better than any other story. Like all stories, some people are into it and some aren't. Some win awards and some don't. Some are hidden gems and some would probably be better if they got pulped. Trying to convince anyone that your story is more right than any other, will only lead to discontent, vexation and hostility.

That's the personal predisposition I bring with me whenever I delve into the topic of myth, magic and religion.

I'm extremely curious. I don't feel it necessary to believe any of it. My lens is impersonal and pragmatic. I'm like an interested outsider, looking in, trying to understand how something works and what it looks like in practice. I'm looking for the patterns, the rituals & rites, and the timelines. But mostly, I'm looking for the reason why. 

I'm endlessly fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves. What do they reveal about the times in which we live, what need do they fulfil, how are these stories used (for good and for evil) and how do these stories get converted into our daily routines and practice? 

Post-Introduction update:

• I should have read the Intro by Robert Temple before publishing this post.
• He posits a kinder way of viewing Frazer's work than did Leach.
• Temple clarifies Frazer's anthropological position as an interest in taboos and totemism.
• He believes that Frazer took 'the grand view' surveying 'world history as a whole'.
• Temple saw Frazer's ability to 'change his hypothesis if he saw it to be inadequate' as one of two 'exemplary characteristics.' The other being his 'disregard for excessive specialisation'. 
• He concluded with, 'Frazer was essentially a nineteenth-century thinker, and approaches to social anthropology have changed....some of his views are no longer compatible with current thinking. However (his work) remains a vital part of cultural history. It is a unique archive and work of literature, and Frazer's splendid prose style is a pleasure to read.'
• A far more generous appraisal of The Golden Bough and Frazer, I'm sure you will agree.

One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Márquez #NobelPrize

Goodness!

What a read. Or more accurately, a reread. I bought my Penguin edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the 3rd April 1996 in Sydney. At a guess, it must have been the Easter school holidays and I was visiting my sister, who lived in Coogee, for a few days. I cannot remember if I read it straight away, or waited until I went home. Either way, I have very little memory of reading this book, except that I found it challenging and often confusing. It was also funny and disturbing and completely different to anything I had ever read before. 

It was my very first magical realism and I wasn't sure if I liked it or not.

The huge cast of characters confused me the most. I couldn't remember who was who, with so many of the six generations sharing exactly the same names. The family tree in the front of the book only added to my confusion.

Since 1996, I've read a lot more magic realism and many more books set in South America. I've learnt that I enjoy magic realism when it is firmly embedded in the real or natural world. Ghosts, in particular, are something I can accept in a story. For me, it's simply taking the idea of being haunted by a memory to the next level. 

Dreams are another element that can carry over into the real world. We've all had those dreams that blur the lines between waking and sleeping, conscious and subconscious. But it's the mixing of the ordinary with the extraordinary that I find really exciting in magic realism. It can become a way of describing something difficult or traumatic in a palatable way - turning our troubles into a fairytale or conflict into a something beautiful and strange. It can become a way of telling our story, especially the really tough stories, by turning them into a story, that makes it possible to get out of bed every day and face another day.

Magic realism can give us hope when despair is everywhere. It mythologises our daily lives and turns us into heroes and demons. It can make sense of the chaos and it can challenge the status quo.

One Hundred Years of Solitude does all of this and more, I simply didn't appreciate that the first time around.

I underlined and asterisked so many sections that it will be impossible to pull out a favourite, but the one the sums up the book the best is,

...always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude is not an easy read or a comfortable read. At times it's overwhelming and so dense that you feel like you're brain might explode. But it is also subversive, humorous and utterly beguiling. Now, more than ever, it's important to be reminded that the world is bigger and more diverse than our Western minds and Western beliefs often take into account. There are other ways of seeing and experiencing this world we all share.

Facts:

• In Spanish - Cien Años de Soledad - 1967
• Translation by Gregory Rabassa published in 1970
• Translated into 37 languages
• Márquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."
• The chapters are not numbered on purpose.
• Márquez was friends with Fidel Castro.
• “What actually strengthened our friendship were books. I discovered he was such a great reader that before publishing a book, I would send him the original. He could spot contradictions, anachronisms, and inconsistencies that even publishing professionals fail to notice. He is a very careful and voracious reader. The books he chooses to read reflect quite well the breadth of his tastes."
• Latin American Boom - 
• A common criticism of the Boom is that it is too experimental and has a "tendency toward elitism" - García Márquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin -America." Donald L. Shaw (1998), The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction.
• "It is no exaggeration to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution (although Cuba is not in South America) and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971." Gerald Martin (2008), Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

First sentence:

• Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
• What a first sentence! It tells us all the main things we need to know about this story - the passing of time, the acceptance of craziness and unexpected occurrences, the guarantee of death, pathos and memory, and the promise of an entire life from beginning to end.

Gabriel García Márquez:

• Born: 6th March 1927, Aracataca, Colombia.
• Died: 17th April 2014, Mexico City, Mexico.
• Moved to Paris in 1957 -
• “What was important to me in Paris was the perspective that the city gave me on Latin America. There, I never ceased being a Caribbean, but rather I became a Caribbean conscious of his culture.”
• In 1958 he married a friend from his uni days, Mercedes Barcha.
• Nickname - Gabo.
• "The most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression" - McMurray, George R. (1987), Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez
• “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”
• "To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life." Gabriel Garcia Márquez (1982) Nobel Lecture: The Solitude of Latin America.
• "What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it."
• “[Critics], in general, have a scripted right to pontificate, but they fail to realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is devoid of seriousness and full of nods to my most intimate friends, winks that these friends alone discover. Still, the critics claim responsibility of decoding the book, thereby covering themselves in ridicule.”
• "The world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain." Michael Wood (1990) Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Cambridge University Press.
• "There is always something left to love."
• "If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already." Love in the Time of Cholera 

A huge thank you to Silvia and Ruth for hosting The One Hundred Years of Solitude readalong. It was the excuse I needed to tackle this rather unwieldy book again. I'm glad I did and now I'm ready for Love in the Tome of Cholera!

2020 | Here We Come!

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Sometimes in this blogging life, the words just won't come.

I have several posts on the back burner waiting for inspiration, time and for the right words to appear. In the meantime, I will fill the gaps with housekeeping posts and lists.

Once upon a time, I used to join in a ridiculous amount of reading challenges.
I'd read books with colours in the titles, from every country around the world, or all the counties in England! I read by numbers, by lottery, in large groups and small. I filled out bingo cards and joined reading challenges to decrease my TBR pile, my classics pile, my Aussie author pile and my award winning books pile.

They were all fun at the time, even as I knew I had no chance whatsoever, in following through and completing them.

Over my decade of blogging, I've finally learnt what works for me and what doesn't.

Even though all those other challenges were fun, a great way of meeting other bloggers and working through my TBR pile, they ultimately made me feel guilty, obligated and bogged down by the end of the year.

I've learnt that I love:

• a readalong. 
• a slow read.
• historical fiction and classics.
• Australian lit, Japanese lit and award winning books.
• memoirs, history and travel books.
• cook books and my kids books.
• rereading.

Which brings me nicely to my 2020 plans.

I will start the year with Sheila's First Book of the Year photo challenge which will include a picture of me with my next classic for Nick's slow read chapter-a-day readalong, War and Peace.

Together we've read, Les Miserables (very successfully), Don Quixote (less successfully - I bailed halfway through), The Count of Monte Cristo (another big success) and now we have War and Peace to look forward to.

This will be a reread for me.

I first read W&P in the Antipodean summer of 2001. I had just bought my first home and I spent all of the January school holidays either ploughing my way through W&P, painting, gardening or decorating my new home.

My edition was a 1942/1970 Sandstone Publishing one, translated and abridged (yikes! how did that slip by me at the time?) by Princess Alexandra Kropotkin. I raced through the 696 pages, skim reading a lot of it. I can now barely remember a thing.

Between now and January 1st, I will hunt out an edition that has the 361 chapters, as recommended by Nick, and a better translation. The Princess AK and I did not gel at all last time round.
Your recommendations for translations are greatly appreciated.
#warandpeacereadalong

I will then read a Gen III AWW book for Bill in the middle of January. I haven't decided which one yet, but no doubt it will be one of my slimmer options! Maybe The Pea Pickers by Eve Langley, The Dye House by Mena Calthorpe or one of my Thea Astley's.

January is also the beginning of three months of reading Japanese Literature with Meredith.

I have so many options to chose from, I'm not sure where to even start! But I've been craving Murakami recently, so I may go there and I also a number of new releases that I wouldn't mind getting to whilst they are still new!

In February I will complete my own slow read readalong of Moby-Dick.
Now that I have (finally) learnt how to schedule tweets, I feel that the next readalong I host will feature a consistent quote tweeting strategy.

Whatever book I choose for my next hosted readalong, won't be until the second half of the year. Why, I hear you ask?
The reason why should become abundantly clear as you keep scrolling down!

March through to mid April is a One Hundred Years of Solitude Readalong with Ruth and Silvia.

For the life of me I cannot remember if it's this Marquez that I've read or Love in the Time of Cholera. I guess I will find out on the 6th March!

April, of course, is always saved for Fanda and her marvellous Zoladdiction month. I'm reading my way through the Rougon-Macquart series chronologically.

In 2020 I'm due to read the fourth book, La Conquête de Plassans.

July's reading commitment is for Lisa's Indigenous Literature Week early in the month. I plan to read one from my TBR pile and a new release.

However July is also Paris in July with Tamara, when I love to pull out a Maigret or two and maybe a Balzac.

I finish the year with my very own AusReadingMonth in November.

I do enjoy reading non-stop Aussie books for a month, but I find the blogging schedule exhausting. After talking with Meredith, I've been wondering if a more relaxed three month reading challenge would be easier on me, and also easier for people joining in all around the world.

What are your thoughts on an AusReadingSeason from September through to the end of November?

Naturally, new and unexpected reading opportunities will come up throughout the year.

I may try to use Rachel's History Reading Challenge to read The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple. A specific challenge may the only way to get through this chunkster in a timely fashion.

Rachel is also hosting a Wolf Hall Trilogy Readalong for those of us wanting to reread Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies before the final book, The Mirror and the Light is published in March.

I'm very, very tempted, except that my dance card is already pretty full for January and February!

Erica has created a Reading Classic Books Challenge for 2020.

• Reading War and Peace will give me a classic over 500 pages and a book in translation. 
• The Zola will be a classic that takes place in a country other than where you live.
• My Gen III AWW book will count as a classic written by a woman. 
• And no doubt my 2020 CC Spins will help me fill out a few more slots on her list.

Finally, my real life book group.
Our Jan/Feb read will be Marcus Zusak's Bridge of Clay and our March read is Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

It's just as well I don't really join in reading challenges anymore!!

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

My work has been a bit crazy this year. And during August and September it was hectic and full of changes. So a lot of the hype surrounding the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale passed me by. I saw some excited chattering on blogs, twitter and goodreads. I heard some of the discussion around it's long-listing for the Booker Prize before publication date. And I caught a fleeting glimpse of the embargo breach by Amazon.

But until the day before the Booker announcement, I hadn't really given The Testaments much thought. Obviously I wanted to read it. I usually love Atwood's stuff and I LOVED The Handmaid's Tale. But it would have to be twenty years since I last read it.

When I first read it in my twenties it made me furious (in that good bookish way when a book excites your passions). A reread, a few years later in my early thirties, confirmed that it could still enrage me (in that good bookish way when a book can get under your skin).

Sadly, I missed the recent Elizabeth Moss tv adaptation of the book.

My plan had been to reread The Handmaid's Tale prior to starting The Testaments. I was in no hurry; knew I would get around to it one of these days, so I just let it sit in the back of my mind for later on.

Until Monday afternoon last week, when my new boss asked me who I thought would win the Booker. I had been so busy, I hadn't even clocked that it was that time of year again. Not having read any of the shortlist, all I could go on was my gut feel that Atwood would win. Her book had the hype, her writing was guaranteed to be good and it seemed like the safe option.

Tuesday morning.

I was up early, getting ready for work, thinking a million other thoughts about all the things I needed to prioritise at work that day. As I sat down to eat breakfast, I glanced at twitter and suddenly realised that the Booker Prize was about to be announced. I quickly found the facebook feed so that little old me, all the way across the other side of the world on a completely different day, could watch the Monday night announcement in London, live! Don't you just love technology.

And joint winners!

Didn't see that coming at all.

Without even thinking about it, I raced up to my bedroom, grab The Testaments from beside my bed and read the first chapter before work.

Any thought of rereading The Handmaid's Tale first went straight out the window - my justification being to see if one could read The Testaments without having any, or much knowledge of the first. I was going to offer myself up as a reading guinea pig!

So what did I remember about The Handmaid's Tale after all this time?

None of the names for starters, except that the Handmaids were named after the man - 'Offred' 'Ofthomas' etc. The handmaids were basically baby making machines. For some reason the wives were not able to produce healthy babies of their own. Religious ritual was evolved to make the baby making thing palatable. I remember that, in the end she (the main character, the titular Handmaid) must have escaped, or at least her story had got out, as she was being studied in a future history class or symposium. I remember that it was religious fanaticism that created Gilead, that this regime was still fairly new as people could remember a time before. I remember thinking that the parallels with our times were frighteningly familiar - which is the trademark of all truly good sci-fiction writing - to make it just enough like our world to make it seem possible. I recall that our Handmaid, either rediscovered her old boyfriend or established a new connection with a driver or guard or someone who helped her plan her escape. I believe the ending was deliberately unclear about the success of this mission. I loved it. It was feminist and very critical of the role religion plays in keeping women in their place.

What were my initial reactions as I started The Testaments?

Firstly I was confused by the names. I couldn't remember if any of these people had been in the first book. Aunt Lydia? Commander Kyle? Not sure.

But I was soon delighted to discover that this didn't matter very much, as what I was getting here was the back story that filled in all the gaps. Via various narrators we saw how Gilead was created, how the rest of the world responded to this change as well as various hints and rumours about the story surrounding our earlier Handmaid and what happened to her and her baby.

I've read that some people have been disappointed or underwhelmed by Atwood's latest offering, but I thoroughly enjoyed being back her capable hands.

It didn't move me as strongly as I recall being moved by The Handmaid's Tale. This book felt less political, less feminist, less concerned with religion, less personal and dare I say, less urgent. Perhaps the chorus of voices diluted the power that I experienced with the first Handmaid's story. Maybe I've mellowed with age. Perhaps Atwood has. Or it could be a simple as the purpose of the story. The Handmaid's Tale asked questions and left lots unanswered. The gaps allowed for supposition, insecurity, fear and doubt. The Testaments tidied all of that up. And without giving away the ending, the homage to the first book at the end of the second, was satisfying and offered a number of pleasing resolutions.

Naomi @Consumed by Ink and Marcie @Buried in Print are hosting Margaret Atwood Reading Month in November that will include a readalong of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments. I'm the rebel who will be reading the books in reverse order as I'm hoping to squeeze in a reread of The Handmaid's Tale along with ALL the other blogging commitments I have on my plate for November!

To finish up, I want to bring to light a little known Aussie connection to Atwood. Well, I didn't know this - perhaps you did?

In the Sydney Morning Herald on the 16th Feb 2019, Nick Bryant wrote,

Her connection with the Sunshine State comes from her second husband, the novelist Graeme Gibson, whose father emigrated there from Canada in search of a friendlier climate and cleaner air. "Every time we got invited to Australia we would go up to Brisbane to visit the rellies," she says, laughing. "His mother and his grandmother were from there." 

Longlisted for The Giller Prize 2019

The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch

Just as well I've been reading Moby-Dick in the lead-up to starting this book. Just like Melville, Murdoch loves to list and categorise things. In this case, Murdoch spent the first part of The Book and the Brotherhood listing all the characters, what they were wearing and how they were related or linked.

I had to draw myself a character tree to keep everyone in their rightful place!

It was kinda fun...as we watched a bunch of ageing college friends run around their old campus in a weird, debauched summer-time fling at their lost youth. We quickly realise though that they haven't really evolved emotionally very much from their youthful passions - with lots of whose sleeping with who, she said what? and he looked at me the wrong way kind of shenanigans.

I'm always amazed how Murdoch can create a story full of pretty unlikable characters, yet hold your interest at the same time. I guess it's her ideas and philosophy that intrigue. Maybe Oxbridge really is full of people just like the ones in this book, but it's hard to credit that there could be so many dithering, ineffectual intellectuals running around England, not really doing anything with their lives.

A couple of the men seemed to have some kind of vague government job, and of course, Crimond had his book to write, but everyone else just swanned around doing nothing but overthink, well, everything.

The entire cast of characters were so caught up in themselves that they constantly bounced from one catastrophic emotional drama to the next, inflicting harm on each other at an exhausting rate, with very little self-awareness and barely a public observance of contrition.

It's frustrating to get the end of this rather huge book, to find one of characters still saying 'other people are so mysterious'. No-one seems to have worked out anything. They all just keep on fluffing along, drifting in and out of things with very little purpose or decision.

But, perhaps, that's what we all do in the end.

During our lives most of us only have a few significant times when we might make conscious choices to change or do something differently. I suspect that many of us, do indeed, just drift along, waiting to see what will happen next, rather than acting decisively.

I could waffle on for several more paragraphs about the ideas and Murdochian tropes at play in The Book and the Brotherhood, but I'm too tired and I've had enough.
Today's conscious, purposeful act is to end this response here!

Favourite Character: Jenkin

Favourite Quote: that sums up my reading experience perfectly!

It was possible, he knew, to esteem and admire people and enjoy their company and dislike them heartily. It was also possible to be irritated, maddened and bored by people whom one loves.

Favourite of Forget: My favourite Murdoch so far.

Folly: I spent the entire month of September calling this book The Brook and the Butherhood. The spoonerism queen strikes again!

Fact: read for Lizzy's #IMreadalong @Adventures in Reading. This is her book review.

Moby-Dick Chapters 31 - 34

Update:
Ongoing changes at work have taken up quite a bit of my time in the past couple of weeks, and will probably do so in the next few weeks as well. Thankfully, I've got a number of almost completed posts waiting in draft to tide me over this hectic and tiring time.

So far I'm staying up to date with my Moby-Dick reading schedule, but my twitter activity may be a little quieter, or sporadic, for a while. Visiting your blogs and leaving comments may also lag behind. But I'm here, plugging away, slow reading, thinking of you all, trying to use my time wisely and staying optimistic and focused on what's next.

Death:
Sadly, Melville, by all accounts did not reach the end of his days in such a positive frame of mind.

He was lonely, most likely depressed, maybe even slowly losing his mind, and all but forgotten by the world.

On this day in 1891, he died at his home in New York City from a heart attack, aged 72. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.

In the 128 years since his death Melville's literary career has been revived and revised numerous times. One of the articles I read earlier, claimed that his fall from public favour during his lifetime, came about thanks to his outspoken views about Christian missionaries as well as his oft-voiced doubts about other religious practices of the time.

Various church groups and leaders were outraged by his comments and used their influence to publicly criticise him and belittle him at every turn. Their influence, and Melville's genius, could not be denied forever though.

By 1919, the centenary of his birth, his oeuvre was being reassessed and reconsidered.

He is now revered as one of the greatest American writers, and Moby-Dick as one of the great American novels of all time.

Obituary:

NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 29 1891

Herman Melville died yesterday at his residence, 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, this city, of heart failure, aged seventy-two. He was the author of Typee, Omoo, Mobie Dick, and other sea-faring tales, written in earlier years. He leaves a wife and two daughters, Mrs. M. B. Thomas and Miss Melville.

NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 2 1891

There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so far as the English-speaking race extended....he has died an absolutely forgotten man...

In its kind this speedy oblivion by which a once famous man so long survived his fame is almost unique, and it is not easily explicable. Of course, there are writings that attain a great vogue and then fall entirely out of regard or notice. But this is almost always because either the interest of the subject matter is temporary, and the writings are in the nature of journalism, or else the workmanship to which they owe their temporary success is itself the produce or the product of a passing fashion. This was not the case with Herman Melville. Whoever, arrested for a moment by the tidings of the author's death, turns back now to the books that were so much read and so much talked about forty years ago has no difficulty in determining why they were then read and talked about. His difficulty will be rather to discover why they are read and talked about no longer. The total eclipse now of what was then a literary luminary seems like a wanton caprice of fame. At all events, it conveys a moral that is both bitter and wholesome to the popular novelists of our own day...

Melville's pictorial power was very great, and it came, as such power always comes, from his feeling more intensely than others the charm that he is able to present more vividly than others. It is this power which gave these romances the hold upon readers which it is surprising that they have so completely lost.

Articles:

Richard B. Sewall's Vision of Tragedy comes to us this week with thanks to Rick for a copy of the chapter relating to Moby-Dick.

• This book discusses various literary greats via the lens of tragedy.
• tragic truth
• in Ishmael's experience whatever had been grave had not been constant, and what had been constant had not been grave.
• somewhat before this first startling encounter [Ahab & Ishmael], Melville had begun to shift his method from the narrative mode to the dramatic.
• Ahab is more than man, and more than tragic man; he is a self-appointed God.
• tragedy is witness to the moral ambiguity of every action.
• we see the nature of each, how far towards good-and-evil each can go.
• the ending seems too dire for tragedy.
• there is no further comment, no fifth-act compensations to let in a little hope.

I'm fascinated by all the lenses through which one can view Moby-Dick - American archetypes, Marxist, religion, anti-religion, feminist, post-colonialism, good vs evil (morality) and LGBTQIA just to name a few.

But enough of the theory, lets jump into the story.

Chapter 31: Queen Mab

• Queen Mab is a Shakespearean bringer of dreams (from Romeo and Juliet).
• Stubb tells Flask about his queer dream.
• what's real and what's false?
• Stubb's lesson learnt:
• the best you can do, Flask, is to let that old man alone; never speak quick to him, whatever he says.
• First sighting of whales
• if ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
• Stubb's premonition:
• A white whale - did ye mark that, man? Look ye - there's something special in the wind.

Chapter 32: Cetology

• The chapter I've been warned about; the chapter that has put people off this book for good. Do I dare go on? Will I become another lost reader left floundering in all these whale facts?
• No. I survived. I even (almost) enjoyed Melville's lists and definitions and categorising.
• I can see what people call this chapter, the first Post-modern chapter.
• Whales are fish? Hmmm. I know that scientific thinking wasn't back then what it is today, but even Melville knew that he was flying in the face of science by stating that whales were fish. I now wonder if Melville would have been a climate change denier as well.
• It shows how hard it is to change people's mind about something that they think they know because it's their life, their job, their experience. Scientific research that challenges these preconceived ideas has a hard battle to fight.
• God keep me from every completing anything. This whole book is a draft - nay, but the draft of a draft. 
• The mystery remains. Not everything can be explained or understood.

Chapter 33: The Specksnyder

• more sailing terms and social class distinctions explained.
• However they all, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work.
• And some stuff about the Divine Inert (a Gnostic idea), Emperors and Kings, sultans and Ahab = Ahab having supreme (even divine) rule over the crew whilst on board the Pequod.

Chapter 34: The Cabin-Table

• Ahab's dinner ritual - more division of life on board a whaler & some scenes of domestic life.
• Dough-Boy, the steward.
• Ahab's power - even though he doesn't forbid chatting at the table, no-one does.

That's it for now shipmates.
Until next week, I hope this finds you in calm seas with plain sailing ahead.

Moby-Dick Chapters 26 - 30

Goodness gracious me! This book is consuming me.
Have I become like the manic Melville or the obsessive Ahab?
Can I possibly maintain this level of enthusiasm and effort?

Who knows!

Like Ishmael, all I can do is go along and go along, to see how this things ends...and hope that I'm one of the ones still left standing at the end.

Chapter 26: Knights and Squires

• Starbuck - chief mate and all round good guy. A Quaker, a Nantucketeer, 'long and earnest.'
• His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength.
• interior vitality
• staid, steadfast man
• hardy sobriety and fortitude
• uncommonly conscientious
• superstitious
• "I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale."
• lost his father & brother to whaling.
• a man who acknowledges his own limitations and is guided by his own inner compass.
• An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
• Melville waxes lyrical about ideal man 'so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature.' 
• It's nice to have a dream Herman. But I fear that 'democratic dignity' is even further away from our lives than it was in 1851.
• Three examples - John Bunyan, Miguel de Cervantes & Andrew Jackson - three men who rose above their disabilities and circumstances, with God's help, of course. Free will or destiny? Melville's Calvinistic upbringing would have him believe in predestination (i.e. that God will save some souls but not others), but Melville's life experiences were moving him away from this belief. Ishmael is clearly striving to create his own fate; Ishmael has free will and uses it with intelligence and a sense of self-awareness. Whereas Ahab believes that his fate is predetermined by a force outside his control and that everything that has happened to him is for a reason and all he can do is follow it to it's (logical) end point. 
• Is Starbuck's name meant to suggest that he is someone who can 'buck' fate? That his future is not written in the stars, but of his own making?

Chapter 27: Knights and Squires

• Take two!
• The title of these 2 chapters made me think of Don Quixote, so I was delighted to see that Melville also went there with his reference to Cervantes. 
• These men are not just mates and harpooners; they are grander, more heroic, more noble than mere sailors or whalers - they are sailing nobility!
• Stubb - second mate, happy-go-lucky guy. A Cape-Cod-man who loved to smoke his pipe.
• good-humoured, easy and careless
• impious good-humour
• his non-stop smoking kept him healthy, chilled and relaxed - I wonder if tobacco was all he smoked?
• Flask - third mate, who hated whales with a passion. From Martha's Vineyard.
• pugnacious
• seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him.
• ignorant, unconscious fearlessness
• waggish
• Flask is reckless and passionate compared to Starbuck's steady, cautious, calm. Stubb is the 'whatever' guy in the middle.
• Each mate is accompanied by a 'boat-steerer or harpooner'.
• Starbuck and Queequeg
• Stubb and Tashtego 
• 'an unmixed Indian from Gay Head' (on Martha's Vineyard).
• from a long line of 'daring harpooners'.
• Flask and Daggoo
• a volunteer from Africa
• a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage
• with 'two golden hoops' in his ears.
• erect as a giraffe
• imperial
• For all of the democratic dignity and equality idealism of the previous chapter, Melville (or Ishmael) reveals the strict class system that actually exists on board the Pequod.
• The rest of the crew 'not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast...are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.'
• the native [white] American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.
• Black Little Pip - poor Alabama boy  
• Melville suggests we will get to hear more about this lad before he is 'sent for'.
• called a coward here, hailed a hero there!

Chapter 28: Ahab

• Finally!
• Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
• Ishmael is clearly our narrator again. The last 2 chapters felt like Melville getting in the way of Ishmael's story. Who has the authorial ascendancy?
• Ahab
• seemed made of solid bronze
• a huge lividly whitish scar ran down one side of his face and neck
• how he got this scar has become an old sea-tradition
• overbearing grimness
• barbaric white leg
• firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness
• as the weather warms up, Ahab spends more and more time on deck
• more than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.

Chapter 29: Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb

• Our first complex chapter heading.
• A few days have gone by & we are now sailing near the Equator
• the warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, over-flowing, redundant days
• such winsome days and such seducing nights
• the calm before the storm?
• Ahab is 'wakeful' and views his cabin as a tomb.
• Most nights he is considerate of his shipmates and refrains from 'patrolling the quarter-deck' to avoid the 'reverberating crack and din of that bony step.'
• But one night he forgets and Stubb is unable to sleep.
• with 'a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness', Stubb hinted to Ahab about ways to muffle the noise.
• Ah! Stubb, thou did'st not know Ahab then.
• Ahab calls him a dog in no uncertain terms.
• Stubb is offended...and says so.
• "Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!"
• I know this is a clear case of work-place bullying, but it's also rather funny!
• Stubb wonders for the first, is Ahab mad?
• Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out.
• Stubb philosophy: 
• Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.

Chapter 30: The Pipe

• Ahab gives up smoking:
• this smoking no longer soothes
• a sign of an unquiet soul?
• Can what happens next be blamed on nicotine withdrawal?

#MobyDickReadalong

Moby-Dick Chapters 21 - 25

Ahoy, there shipmates!
We're finally on board the Pequod and due to set sail, any chapter now.

I've had a week, not unlike Peleg and Bildad, stocking up, ticking off lists, organising and categorising, as we plan for a new adventure at work. Which is my excuse for not getting around to doing any supplementary reading on Melville this week.

Chapter 21: Going Abroad

• More Elijah impertinence & prophecy
• Mysterious, shadowy sailors only seen by Ishmael & Elijah.
• More slap-stick humour with Queequeg sitting on sleeping sailor, then laughing about how easy it would be to kill him!
• Admiration for (the as yet, unmet) Starbuck 
• 'he's a lively chief mate...a good man, and a pious.'
• Starbuck was an important Quaker family name on Nantucket.
• Starbuck Island in the South Pacific named after this family.
• According to wikipedia: 
• 'Starbuck Island was first sighted in 1823 by Valentine Starbuck, American-born master of the British whaling ship L'Aigle on which the young king and queen of Hawaii, travelled to England in 1823–1824. However it had probably been sighted previously that same year by his cousin and fellow-whaler Capt. Obed Starbuck.'
• Ahab still 'invisibly enshrined within his cabin'.

Chapter 22: Merry Christmas

• Peleg & Bildad acting like the Ernie & Bert of the shipping world!
• 'as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen'.
• Ishmael received his 'first kick' - his merchant experience not so useful on a whaling ship?!
• A long voyage ahead 
• 'this day three years I'll have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket.'
• Setting sail on Christmas Day...reflects the Quaker belief that Christmas Day is not a special day worth celebrating as Quaker tradition says that EVERY day is sacred.

Chapter 23: The Lee-Shore

• Bulkington - barely on land from his last voyage & now heading back out to sea again.
• Foreshadowing - 'this six-inch chapter is the stone-less grave of Bulkington.'
• A decent man, but apparently this is the last time we see or hear about him.
• An unsung hero, a regular good guy whose story is subsumed by Ahab's mania...?
• He represents all the men on board we never meet or get to know.

Chapter 24: The Advocate

• In which Ishmael discusses whaling as an honourable vocation.
• 'And we get a version of Australian history:
• That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman....The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.'
• Hopelessly non-PC to a modern reader, but that's how the white world viewed the world and its history until very recent times. 

Chapter 25: Postscript

• In which Ishmael touches on the uses of oil in the coronation of kings and queens.
• One of the short chapters - barely a page in length.
• My new favourite word introduced - QUOGGY - meaning soft or flabby of person.

It's also time for another photo challenge for #MobyDickintheWild. 

This week take pictures of your copy of Moby-Dick with your favourite/most bizarre/curious nautical or marine objects.

Moby-Dick with my father-in-law's weather gauge.

#MobyDickReadalong

Moby-Dick Chapters 12 -16

I'm loving this slow, leisurely read of Moby-Dick - a lot!

I'm not sure I would be enjoying it as half as much as I am, if I was reading it one chapter after another. It would be too rich a diet for me.

My last couple of books have been like souffles that fell flat right at the last minute, or failed to properly rise. Whereas Moby-Dick is like a rich double choc fudge cake that is best savoured in small doses.

Reading a book with very little plot, makes it easy to pick and put down as well. There are no cliff hangers, each chapter almost reads as its own little vignette.

It has surprised me, this love for such a well-known difficult classic. I was expecting to struggle; instead I've turned into a Melville fanatic!

My other surprise comes from preconceived impressions. I thought Moby-Dick was all about a whale and Captain Ahab and obsession. Instead I have found that Ishmael is our charming protagonist and narrator. He is telling us the story of Ahab and Moby as he observed it and he enjoys describing (in great detail) his role in the affair. He is trying to understand what happened by examining every single element that led to the tragic events on board the Pequod.

I'm enjoying reading everyone's updates and seeing the different themes and threads that interest others. This is obviously a book that can be read and appreciated via multiple lenses.

I'm still working my way through various readings about Melville himself. I recently discovered another article of interest that helped to partly explain why Moby-Dick was not appreciated during his time - James Wood The All of the If in The New Republic 18th March, 1997.

• His first book, Typee (1846), is an autobiographical account of his adventures, and it was taken as such by contemporary readers. Melville’s unsympathetic view of the activity of Christian missionaries in Polynesia guaranteed hostile reviews from papers and journals associated with churches. Such critics would note all future examples of religious skepticism in Melville’s writing. But the book was an international success. Largely owing to the unconventional sexual escapades described by a willing Melville.

 Wood also had views on Melville's struggle with religion:

• Melville did not need to be braced against the pieties of his age, and they demanded little from him. He needed to be braced against the flickering horror of his refusal to believe, and then braced against the sour clarity of his refusal entirely to unbelieve.

He felt that all of Melville's writing was 'shadowed' by his early Calvinism. A Calvinism that believed in the quality of helplessness, predestination and being chosen (or not) by the grace of God regardless of any good works you might do.

He quoted Hawthorne, who wrote of Melville that 'he can neither believe, nor be comfortable with his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.' Woods expanded on this idea -

• In his relation to belief, Melville was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his hat and gloves. And yet he did not want to be at the party, either. It is just that he had nowhere else to be and would rather be with people than be alone. He was tormented by God’s “inscrutable” silence.

Moby-Dick came about thanks to 'Melville majestically discover(ing) three things: metaphor, metaphysics and Shakespeare' between 1847 and 1850.

• While he is busy seeing a world stripped of God’s presence, he is busy theologizing literature. God has disappeared only to speak as literature. If the Messiah comes again, it will be as Shakespeare. But the Messiah has come again, and he is called Melville. It is Melville who, in Moby-Dick, will follow “Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth.”

Melville obviously had a fairly healthy opinion of his own abilities!

• Soaked in theology, Melville was alert to the Puritan habit of seeing the world allegorically, that is, metaphorically. The world was a place of signs and wonders which could always yield up its meaning like secret ink. Melville did a certain amount of this sign-gazing himself.

• The whale is “inscrutable.” It is so full of meanings that it threatens to have no meaning at all, which is the fear that Ishmael confesses to in the celebrated chapter called “The Whiteness of The Whale.” Critics who persist in seeing in Melville an American Gnostic do so because the whale is a demiurge, a bad god. But what, Melville asks, if the whale means nothing? What if, at the very heart of the sarcophagus, there is absolutely nothing? 

• Theologically, Melville lived his life in an eternal If, which his love of metaphor only encouraged.

Melville was obviously a complex man struggling with existential angst.

But enough of the man, time to get back to this week's chapters.

Chapter 12: Biographical

• Queequeg's history starts off on a fictional island - Kokovoko. 
• I'm assuming that Melville's information about his life on a Pacific island came from his own time on Huku Hiva, the largest of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia in 1842. 
• As we also know, Melville was capable of exaggerating, for the sake of a good yarn. 
• I suspect Queequeg may have inherited this trait!
• 'the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked.'

Chapter 13: Wheelbarrow

• Actually two wheelbarrows - the one that carried their gear to the Nantucket schooner plus the very first wheelbarrow that Queequeg ever saw. 
• Which leads to two 'humorous' stories about cultural confusion - Queequeg carrying his wheelbarrow and a ship's Captain invited to a traditional wedding feast on Kokovoko who misunderstood the consecration ceremony. 
• These two stories highlight how cultural mishaps are generally only amusing to one side.
• 'And just when you think that Ishmael/Melville is finding a better frame of mind, we have this
• Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.'
• Ishmael & Queequeg's public walk to the wharf revealed 'jeering glances', 'mimicking' and verbal taunts.
• We finish with a scene of spontaneous, natural bravery designed to make us question who is the real savage and who is meant to be civilised and humane.
• Queequeg as hero - 'It's a mutual, joint-stock world in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.'

Chapter 14: Nantucket

• Finally, we're on a boat, but we're still not heading out to sea. Across the straits to Nantucket we go.
• Which means it's time for Melville to give us the history of this 'mere hillock, and elbow of sand'!
• quohogs - clams.
• Reference to Psalm 107 - those who work in ships 'see the works of the lord.' 
• Melville romanticising Nantuckateers and sailors.

Chapter 15: Chowder

• The Spouter-Inn landlord recommended they stay at the Try Pots run by his cousin, Horea Hussey, 'famous for his chowders'.
• Foreshadowing - 'I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving....It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows!'
• Clam or cod chowder on the menu - with recipe of course.

Chapter 16: The Ship

• 'In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow' - a very intimate scene.
• They decide that Ishmael should find a ship for the both of them, on his own. 
• Queequeg claims his idol told him so. 
• I wonder if he was worried about being discriminated against?
• The Pequod - 'the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct' 
• So the ship Ishmael & Queequeg are about to set sail on was named after a tribe that was unable to survive, that was decimated by colonisation.
• Captain Peleg - a Biblical name meaning channel, canal or a division.
• Captain Bildad - a Biblical name meaning the Lord loved - one of Job's friends - a consoler/accuser.
• They are the ying & yang of leadership, or perhaps the Bert & Ernie of the sailing world! 
• Both are Quakers (who believe they have a direct line of communication with God).
• Peleg greets Ishmael in the manner that Jonah was greeted by the captain of his ship, according to Father Mapple' sermon. 
• Ishamel puts it down to Peleg being an 'insulated Quakerish Nantucketer...full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens.'
• Ishmael, the grand adventurer - 'I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.'
• Captain Ahab mentioned - 'thou wilt find he has only one leg.'
• 'a queer man...but a good one...a grand, ungodly, god-like man...doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen.'
• Apparently, though,  'it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one'.

Although I have got a little behind with posting, my chapter schedule for Moby-Dick is proceeding smoothly. Hopefully this weekend, I will catch up on my next post as well as visit the rest of you posting weekly chapter catch-ups.

Moby-Dick Chapters 8 -11

Since last we spoke, I've been reading up on Herman to gain more insights into his history, motivations, character and intentions.

I've been feeling quite confused about him actually. I felt that I was getting mixed messages. Or that I had missed the memo that explained everything.

Philbrick in Why Read Moby-Dick? had prepared me for Melville's anti-slavery stance - 'a lie festered at the ideological core of the then-thirty states of America' - and for his first hand experience with the 'democratic diversity' of working life on board a whaling ship. But for some reason I came away from this book thinking that Melville was a devout, religious man - with his biblical stories, analogies and 'divine equality'. Philbrick again, tells us that he was deeply concerned about death and what came next - 'is there a heaven?'

However his story is far more complex than that. And I will probably spend the next 7 months trying to unravel it! After only nine chapters I heard Melville sermonise on Jonah with all that old testament doom and gloom about original sin, guilt and punishment but then there was also moments, via Ishmael, where he was deeply questioning of the (political and religious) status quo as well as the strict beliefs that informed his Calvinistic upbringing. What was going on here?

It was only as I reread parts of Philbrick today, that I discovered a small line that I had missed first time, 'as the agnostic writing outside his own uncertain beliefs, Melville is describing the fantasy he desperately needed but could never quite convince himself existed.'

Agnostic!

Now that explains a lot.

His agnosticism now explains to me that amazingly astute, acerbic line in The Spouter-Inn chapter:

The man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Strange bedfellows indeed (Shakespearean pun intended!)
But it does make me wonder who Melville was thinking of - did he have a particular drunk Christian in mind or was it more of a general philosophical statement? Or was he simply saying that he would rather be with a sober/rational 'other' than with one of those Christians who fail to practice what they preach?

Anyway, below is what I've unearthed (of interest to me) so far.

• (wikipedia) Melville was 'the descendant of Revolutionary War heroes on both sides, Melville was born in 1819 to a status and prosperity that abruptly vanished when his father failed in business. Allan Melville died insane, leaving his wife to raise eight children on the scant funds wealthy relatives would spare.'
• Young Herman contracted scarlet fever in the mid 1820's which caused lifelong vision issues.
• His parents were members of the Dutch Reformed Church - a Calvinist theology.
• His father's business failed during the 1830's depression, after which he grew ill, possibly with some form of 'nervous delirium' and died in 1832.
• Herman was taken out of school to start work - first as a banking clerk, then as a teacher (obviously teacher qualifications were different back in the 1830's).
• In 1839 he studies surveying and engineering before sailing as crew on the St Lawrence from new York to Liverpool and back.
• 3rd Jan 1841 Melville sailed out of New Bedford on board the whaling ship Acushnet. After 15 months, he and a friend, Richard Tobias Greene, deserted during a stopover on Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Island in Polynesia. 'Melville was impressed with their sophistication and peacefulness; most Europeans believed that Polynesians were cannibals. He also found reason to criticise European attempts to "civilize" the islanders by converting them to Christianity.' ** 
• A few weeks later they joined the Australian whaling ship, the Lucy Ann. The crew mutinied and Melville spent a brief period of time in a Polynesian gaol (probably on Tahiti) before escaping with a friend, John B. Troy. 
• He signed onto another whaling ship, the Charles and Henry. Glutton for punishment, I hear you say, except that this time he enjoyed 'three months of leisure quite different from his previous journeys. Once they arrived at Hawaii Melville was honorably discharged and worked in a bowling alley and in a store (Bradbury 171).' ***
• During his time in Hawaii, Melville became a vocal opponent against the Christian missionaries trying to convert the local native population.
• (wikipedia) Melville had an 'obsession for the limits of knowledge that led to the question of God's existence and nature, the indifference of the universe, and the problem of evil.'
• On 17th August 17 1843 Melville enlisted in the Navy on board the frigate United States. Kirby (1993) noted that “Even though Melville had seen a fair amount of human unpleasantness on his three previous voyages, nothing had quite prepared him for the institutionalized brutality of life aboard the United States.”  ****
• 1846 Typee published.
• 1847 Omoo published and marries Elizabeth Knapp Shaw
• August 1850 meets Nathaniel Hawthorne and wrote a lot of letters.
• 1851 Moby-Dick published.
• 1852 Pierre published.
• Many now think that Melville had bi-polar or manic depression. His wife considered divorcing him 1867 due to insanity.
• He was troubled by money problems his whole life.
• I agree with Brain Pickings - it doesn't matter whether Herman was homosexual, bisexual or homoerotic in nature,

• The quotient of intimacy cannot be contained in a label. The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse — to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable — varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again — cannot begin to contain the complexity of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them. (my highlights)

• Melville was critical of western imperialism - John Paul Wenke in Melville's Muse (1995) says about Typee, 'Melville not only dramatizes the limitations of the Western point of view but also reveals how Eden Regained is itself a self-gratifying, and fallacious, cultural fiction.'
• 'When he stopped publishing novels in 1857, it wasn’t because he had run out of ideas—it was because no publisher could afford to print his books, which always lost money,' writes Mark Beauregard, the author The Whale: A Love Story. 'He started writing poetry instead.'
• 1866 Battle-Pieces (five Civil War poems) published.
• 1876 Clarel published.

* source
** source
*** source
**** source

Which brings me to my thoughts about -

Chapter 8: The Pulpit

• The famous Father Mapple!
• 'Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one'
• 'Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.' What a performance!
• 'Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak.'
• 'the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.'

Chapter 9: The Sermon

• Fanda is correct in saying that Simon Callow's reading of this chapter on the Big Read podcast is a real treat - very theatrical, complete with dramatic voices, fire and brimstone!
• I've actually reread and listened to various versions of this chapter several times in an attempt to unpack its meaning. 
• I realised after reading Fanda's post about the religious themes in the preceding chapters, that I had missed a lot of Melville's religious purpose. I don't see the world through a lens of sin, or of 'punishment, repentance, prayers' so I impatiently skimmed my first reading of this chapter. But Fanda and the Whale, Whale, Whale podcast prompted me to look a little closer at Melville's meaning and intent.
• The partial singing of the hymn, Death, and the the terrors of the grave comes from Isaac Watts (1674 - 1748) who is purported to be a distant ancestor of mine.
• I wonder...does Father Mapple deliver the same Jonah sermon every week? Given he has a church designed by and for whalers and there are only 'four chapters - four yarns' in the bible about whaling, does he just repeat and supplement the same story each time?
• Themes within the Jonah story (thank you google)  
• God's mission, nature and character, the nature of evil, salvation, forgiveness, the emptiness of life lived apart from God, repentance, mercy, omnipresence, the unfulfilled and conditional nature of prophecy and compassion. 
• The old testament sure knew how to scare the bejeezus out of you!
• Jonah had 'no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag'. 
• Ishmael had a whole chapter devoted to HIS carpet-bag! 
• Melville lesson #1 - don't trust a man without a carpet-bag.
• Jonah 'paid the fare thereof' while Ishmael worked his passage. 
• Melville lesson #2 - don't trust a man who takes the soft option.
• Jonah - a 'fugitive finds no refuge' by running away to sea. Ishmael goes to sea with meditation in mind. 
• Melville lesson #3 -  you cannot run away from your problems.
• Pop culture references brought to mind 
• The movie Master & Commander and the Jonah story told within.
• The West Wing 'Two Cathedrals' episode with all 'the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without' and the preacher who 'seemed tossed by a storm himself'. And Jonah who 'feels that his dreadful punishment is just', is like Jed Bartlett railing at his god after the death of Mrs Landingham.
• If only a few more people could 'preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!' in the real world White House.
• Melville finishes with a several long paragraphs all about the 'eternal delight and deliciousness' - his search for heaven continues.

Chapter 10: A Bosom Friend

• Lots of comparisons about what is supposedly civilised and what is 'heathenish'.
• 'Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.' 😅
• 'I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved a hollow courtesy.' 
• Again with the Christians who give religion a bad name.
• 'to do the will of God.' 
• Melville lesson #4 do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
• 'There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends....this, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.' 

Chapter 11: Nightgown

• 'Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we.' 
• I suspect that such intimate contact between a male/female couple would not have been written about and read without censure in 1851, let alone between two men.
• 'truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold.' 
• I read this chapter in rural NSW last week during a sudden cold snap that produced snow on the ranges around us. I was snuggled under multiple covers, with Mr Books for a hot water bottle, and nothing but my ears, nose and fingers sticking out, and slowing turning into icicles. This quote felt truly alive with personal relevance.
• 'yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them' almost reads like a Benny Hill (the master of double entendre) skit!

Thank you to those who posted their #MobyDickintheWild pics on instagram and twitter. I also loved how Laurie is now finding whales everywhere she goes!

Sorry about another long post; I seem to have absorbed some of Melville's verbosity and love of detail!