Karoline > Recent Status Updates

I love this book and it's like Rapunzel turned into a sad-but-compassionate cautionary tale and told from the POV of the prince

Poor Pip has an Edmund-and-the-White Witch kinda situation

somewhat desperately looking for a comfort read while I try to get better, and what better than a grueling epic journey to Mount Doom

for real though, it's soothing to read about dramas that have almost nothing to do with personalities

"[Certain] content encourages parents to overburden themselves with anxiety about whether or not they will inadvertently destroy their kids’ mental health, and it encourages adults to inappropriately focus on their parents’ shortcomings."

Might be the most countercultural sentence of the book so far.

appreciating how carefully & consistently this book is navigating though various scyllas and charybdises

I feel like Austen's Henry Tilney reading Ann Radcliffe

"when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days - my hair standing on end the whole time"

it's almost awe-inspiring to behold the grandiose selfishness and destructiveness Shelley sows through every relationship while passionately claiming to be a prophet of higher love & a new and holier way of life

thought I would read a biography of one of the late Romantic poets after reading a biography of one of the earliest & I'm wondering if Shelley was actually demon possessed

Three men with dead brothers now. Ishmael twinned with the black, coffined, death-dealing Queequeg to whom he's been tied (Ch. 72); Ahab twinned with the black, mad, drowned Pip who calls himself a dead man; the two sons of the Rachel lost at sea and only one found.

Still wondering if there's an Isaac to our Ishmael.

Ch. 124

Space (and time?) just went head over heels and Ahab turned into a black magician with an enchanted crew. Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

gonna write a short story in which Origen, Jonathan Edwards, and Emerson all appear to Melville in a dream and each give him a different mystic writing assignment and the only way he can fulfill all three is by writing Moby Dick

ALSO does our Ishmael have an Isaac? He has a twin - an opposite second self - who's the son of a king - and I'm so curious how their pairing is going to play out.

First half was dominated by the Jonah narrative and images of death, devouring, and swallowing. Everybody is in the belly of the whale & in the shadow of death.

Second half seems to be transitioning away from Jonah and towards Job. As soon as Stubb eats (swallows) the whale, whales become less like monsters and more like Coleridge's beautiful, murdered albatross - revelations of grace and wonder.

I have successfully reached the midpoint of the Book About Things That Swallow Men, namely cannibals, the sea, and whales. Which is to say, Death.

Did Terry Pratchett like Moby Dick because I feel like he would.

is this a novel or is this creatively narrated literary criticism on the symbol of the whale/leviathan across history, science, and literature???

good day for some patristic exegesis!

Boersma is doing his best to make Origen less weird and . . . kinda succeeding?

fav chapters so far are "Incarnational Reading" and "Harmonious Reading"

getting some Miltonic vibes here

So the body is a house.

The house is a ship is a whale is death.

The ship is a whale is death.

And a whole sermon on Jonah about how to live in the belly of the whale. Preached from a "ship" that's NOT a whale.

Just met Ahab, but since his leg is also a whale's jawbone, like apparently everything else in this novel ...

I'd say we're supposed to pay attention to the whale's belly.

Just a wild guess.

the male-marriage image must have hit the imaginations of the original readers very differently than it hits mine . . .

I've been very intimidated by this book, but borrowing courage by reading it with my local reading group. Opened the book and started laughing on the first page. Does it continue this way, like a cross between Charles Dickens and Jorge Luis Borges??

surprise! this is really Creon's story!