Where to start with Melville
Bartleby the Scrivener gives you Melville's deadpan voice and moral strangeness in one office before Moby-Dick opens the ocean.
The whaling chapters stopped your first attempt at Moby-Dick, and you want to understand why digression is part of the voyage.
Reading Moby-Dick at normal novel pace, drowning in the cetology chapters and the digressive sermons, and concluding Melville padded the book. The actual project is a slow accumulation of every kind of writing — the encyclopedia, the sermon, the play script, the natural history — into a cosmology, and the chapters that read like padding are the cosmology being built.
Books in order
- Bartleby, the Scrivener — The textbook gentlest Melville — a hundred-page novella about a New York clerk who would prefer not to. The cleanest way into his sentences before the long whaling cosmology arrives.
- Moby-Dick — Read it in chapters, two or three a sitting. The famous opening is famous for a reason; sit with it. The cetology chapters are not optional; they are the form. Read the sermon at the start, the play scenes in the middle, and the chase at the end as one continuous piece of writing on what it is to chase a meaning that may not exist.
Further reading
- Billy Budd, Sailor — Melville's late short novel — a sailor, a ship, a single act of violence, a court-martial. Often paired with Bartleby as the second door. Not in this catalog yet.