Moby Dick.  Sometimes I love it, sometimes I like it, I never hate it.  The other day I was reading it on the bus and someone asked me if I was reading it for class or for fun.  I told her, "For fun, yippeeee!!!"

Actually I didn't include the yippee or any of the exclamation points.  Someone else piped in that they hated Moby Dick, but then again they read it when they were 17.  While I believe it's important to read challenging books at that age, I wouldn't expect most 17 year olds to like it.  The book focuses on deep subjects such as obsession and vengeance, not the most entertaining things for a 17 year old.  if you're not willing to think about this book on a deeper level, I'm afraid it's going seem like  whole lot of description and hundreds of pages in which "nothing happens."

But how can anyone hate a book with passages such as this.  This section really describes my mentality.  Ahab is a messed up guy, but I can completely relate to his approach to life:


The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and-Aye!  I lost this leg.  I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.  Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one.  that's more than ye, ye great Gods, ever were.  I laugh and hoot at ye.  Take some one of your own size; don't pommel me!  No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden.  Come forth from behind your cotton bags!  I have no long gun to reach ye.  Come, come and see if ye can swerve me.  Swerve me?  ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves!  man has ye there.  Swerve me?  The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.  Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!  Naugh's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!