The Bookhive List: 'Moby Dick' by Herman Melville

This post was meant to happen a few weeks ago to coincide with my What I'm Reading post on Billy Budd, but somehow I got my wires crossed...I do have a life and a job outside this blog so it's going to happen sometimes. 

I have a very different appreciation of Moby Dick than your average Melville fan -- my husband and I spent our honeymoon in Nantucket which inspired me to read the book, about half before the trip and half afterward. The historical and cultural context you gain from visiting the island really enhances the book itself, particularly the chapters most people struggle with, regarding the history of whaling (shout-out to the Whaling Museum, which is WAY more awesome than it sounds).

But as a result, I also really strongly associate the novel with one of the happiest times in my life and one of the best vacations I've ever taken, so I just have warm feelings and beautiful memories associated with the novel. Besides that, it is one of the best, most intense reading experiences I've ever had. It's incredible the way a thousand-page book can manage to be so suspenseful and exciting. Everyone needs to read it in their lifetimes, and preferably read it a few times.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books

What I'm Reading: 'Billy Budd' by Herman Melville

As you'll find out later this week, Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels, and I keep trying and failing to replicate the experience with other stories by Herman Melville; it seems my time would be better spent just re-reading Moby Dick. Billy Budd is not a bad approximation in the loosest possible sense -- it is, after all, a book about sailors. But it lacks all of the metaphor and moral punch of Moby Dick, and although I love Melville's prose, it also lacks the total weirdness of Moby Dick, which is an incredibly idiosyncratic novel.

Books on Books: 'The Art of Fielding' by Chad Harbach

The Melville allusions in The Art of Fielding are heavy-handed and very deliberate -- the campus novel is about a baseball short-stop who seeks an NCAA record with his college team, The Harpooners, at a small liberal arts college on the shore of Lake Michigan which re-branded itself around Melville. when a student discovered that Melville had visited the campus as part of a lecture series. Ostensibly its a novel about college baseball, but only in the sense that baseball is about the human condition. Harbach was an English major at Harvard, so a fair amount of literary allusions, some more subtle than others, work their way into the text.

The Art of Fielding received an extraordinary amount of press when it was finally published, after Harbach spent ten long and arduous years perfecting his debut novel (worth every second). If you somehow missed it the first time around, pick it up immediately, as it was one of the best reviewed books of 2011 and absolutely one of my favorite recent reads. I recommend it just about everyone, regardless of their level of interest in baseball. This is a book for those who like good writing and distinctly American fiction.

I'd love to include a photo of my own for this post, but my copy is utterly destroyed from an incident involving a rickety table, a full glass of red wine, and two excitable dogs.