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Great tips, I live in New Bedford and was born and raised here, so it's almost a crime that I've never read it. Reading through it now on audible while I work, it's very enjoyable, it just requires a lot of brain power to really enjoy it. It's near impossible for me to read if I am tired, but it is very enjoyable when my brain is alert and at 100 percent.

I'm not in a book club, but I highly appreciate your thoughts on books. Anna Karenina is in my top five best books ever. Leo Tolstoy can portray people in a manner that makes them very recognizable. Even though the names are challenging, I found that I knew which character was talking just by the dialogue and his description. He is a master writer. Anna Karenina's first line is one of the most famous openings to a novel in all of literature: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Middlemarch and War and Peace are the only two books that required me to make a character list.

Thank you for your tips! I really liked your video :) I want to start a study group along with a book club, but I was unsure how to start it, but you gave me some clear ideas of how I can do it :)

Heaney's translation is fantastic. The family tree was helpful.

I stumbled across To the Lighthouse on a whim. My library had a short audiobook version (voiced by Juliet Stevenson, who did an amazing job); at first, I was confused, but mesmerized by how I could see the structure of some of my own thoughts so clearly transmuted onto the page. I looked up a few videos to help but what kept me glued to it was the sound of the language, like you said, the beauty alone is enough for the book to last. I think maybe it’s meant to be read aloud, sort of like Shakespeare. Also I listened to that particular audiobook two more times, then found out the (2hr) audiobook was some sort of condensed version 😣 the regular version is more like 7hrs… still short but that’s nearly half as much more. so I felt like I missed a lot of good quotes. Tried reading the unabridged book and it’s great but now I’m so used to the book that I got Lighthouse Fatigue.

Thank you so much for explaining everything in such detail..i needed this❤️👍🏻

Great tips! Thank you so much!

is there a possibility to leave the group?

Struggled through it.

I absolutely love your videos.

Great video and great tips! I found it a good introduction to the book and its themes. I struggled through it the first time, but I felt the magic in it and I wanted to know more so after a period of time had passed I gave it another go and it has since become my favourite book and if the police were to search me they would probably find a copy about me somewhere! The best tip I ever got for reading Moby Dick (forgive me I can't remember who said it or where I heard it) was that it can be read from cover to cover as a whaling adventure OR it could be read in the way that people read the bible and other religious texts; i'.e keeping a copy to mark favourite passages, opening at random pages or random chapters and maybe even sometimes even just reading one sentence. I would keep the book with me and just get it out when I had a free moment and glance at it or sometimes if I had 10 free minutes I could mull over a shorter chapter. Anyway thank you for a great video!

I have a book I would like help finding information about

Please tell me where can I buy these books?

I think you can also be proud of reading Frankenstein or Don Quixote, which both also become sometimes a chore.

We have had the paperback here for at least a year

Thank you

Thanks for these tips. I'm super introverted and usually hate speaking in front of other people, but I'm trying to push myself out of my comfort zone. I joined a book club, but the first meeting is making me super nervous!! Haha

The Symphony of the Supernal Power Melville needed a mighty theme for his “wicked book”. When one goes about accusing God, hunting the Divine Spector and mocking all the various and naive beliefs concerning the Supernal Power, dissembling the accusation of God and the judgment that your fellows are fools requires layering to hide your sacraligious and misanthropic zeal. So Moby Dick is a multi-layered monstrosity of powerfully poetic prose, using a combination of voices, styles, and narrative adjustments that disrupt the narrative and allow for reconsiderations, correctives, and commentary upon the level of interpretation offered. In the Judaic and Christian scriptural interpretations there are four levels of explication: the literal; the allegorical; the moral (tropological) ; and the eschatological (analogically). Very few novels or other works of literature are complex enough to encompass and require these four levels of interpretation. Melville's tale had a source in reality-- the whale ship Essex, and Melville utilizes this tale as a means of establishing a verisimilitude that allows for a literal understanding of his novel as merely an adventure tale. Melville goes to extreme measure to present all the details of whaling and whales, turning chapters into those one might feel belong to a whaling manual rather than a novel. Going even further to provide that very stringent voice of facts and skepticism Melville found insufficient in those who promoted science as if only nature and the scientific method offer us reality--Melville has an entire list opening his book of the etymology of whales. He mocks this simplistic, materialistic view periodically. His description early on of butterflies pinned to a board and labeled by a lepidopterist shows how the very essence of what it means to be a butterfly (its wild, unpredictable flight and vitality) are utterly removed by the time the scientist is ready to label it as the animal it no longer is, but merely resembles. Melville will make fun of those who see Moby Dick as only a whale, and as Moby Dick is God, Melville extends his ridicule to those who do not believe in God or imagine Him as some impersonal, Deistic Deus Abscondis. The water is the spirit world where God dwells, thus "meditation and water are wedded forever". But Melville has no sympathy for those whose view of God as a benevolent, loving Lord either. It is clear that Moby Dick has been the source of great suffering. Ahab's missing leg and the psychological damage he endured in his previous encounter with the divine cetacean show God, in Melville's view, as far from the saccharine, whitewashed loving Heavenly Father of so many simple-minded believers. So the literal and the allegorical interpretations of God and, consequently, of Melville's marvelous novel, both prove insufficient. The moral view fares little better as Ahab's accusations against God, like a violent and angry anti-Job, blast away any idea that there are easy moral lessons behind the workings of Moby Dick's mysterious mannerisms. The eschatological view also suffers ridicule from Melville as he creatively sneaks an epilogue into the middle of his novel in The Town Ho chapter. Here Melville, through a post-Pequod Ishmael, describes a story filled with gospel images and is disbelieved by all in his company. He has them drag in a copy of "The Four Evangelists" (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) upon which Ishmael will put his hand and swear to the "gospel truth" of his tale. But as his tale is, though hidden, the gospel itself, there is a circular, tongue-in-cheek contradiction in his swearing on the gospels that the gospel is true. So complicated were all of Melville's own dealings with God that even these four levels of interpretation prove insufficient to analyze this novel well. We need another level here, and it comes to the fore in the novel when Melville describes in the chapter The Symphony the stepmother kindness of God that almost saves Ahab from his mad quest and his terrible end. The lightning and fire and madness return, but for just a moment we see the other level. That beyond the foolishness of atheism, and beyond the simple-mindedness of easy-belief, with all the horrors of our human helplessness before God, and with all the admitted anger resulting from our dealings with the realities He has left to us, there is something in our humanness that is only answered by that terrible, white, hooded phantom who, from time to time, reveals the only possible healing for our helpless humanity. Melville’s beast of a novel was postmodern before postmodernism in that it deconstructed modernism before it ever got defined. It then dismantled even postmodernism, revealing the vapidness of trying to deconstruct the world as an empty pursuit. If there are any post-postmodern novels, this was certainly the first and remains the most powerful. And all the things people call tedium in the novel are necessary to both reaching this power and familiarizing the readers with the world in which they are engaged.

"Read on" as the words escalate and mount up and up exploring the archaeological underpinnings of people,""ham bolela, tum bolena". I confess I was attracted to Middlemarsh because of its psychological descriptions of the characters and yes the words and more words the way the sentences are arranged and the courtesy of language.

I always enjoy your videos. I listened to part of “Demon” on Audible but didn’t continue. Maybe I’ll go back and retry. I borrowed that book from the library when it was released and it was a heavy paperback. I was afraid I would ruin it if I handled it too much. For me there are too many great books to spend time on “David” for that much time. 📖

Thank you for all those tips. Very helpful.

Not sure this classifies as humor but I highly recommend Calypso by David Sedaris.

Thank you so much for this! We’re starting this book in a few days and we’ll spend two months with it. Super excited for this one

The first time I read this, it must have been a 🐧 Penguin Classic, there was a diagram of the family tree and i remember referring to it often. Emjoyed your tips and i particularly thought it was a good idea to look at the landscape. I'm in Australia and can't image what the landscape could be like. A wasteland here is a desert and extremely hot.

I starting reading classic works a few years back.I figured that if millions of people over centuries found them worthwhile. They were probably worth my time. It was like having a giant vetting/ recommendation system.I only have so many moments and I don't want to spend them thoughtlessly. I see it as a reading journey, not an end goal.I'll probably reread a lot of them. I like to read through them myself then see what other people thought of the work. Forget well read. Think reading traveler one path leads to another in the process you become "well read" meaning well traveled.

Just found your channel a couple days ago. Wow!!!! I ordered The Educated Mind right away and I’ve finished Chapter one. I feel as excited about learning as I did so many years ago as a freshman at Occidental. My degree was in biology. I missed out on much of my classical education, but I love science. Thank you for my new study. I am thrilled.

Love your content!

thank you for the tips and the breakdown. i was interested in reading this book because it's a classic. harker's diary entries, even though they seemed like entries at first, started to sound more like thoughts rather than what someone would actually write. at one point he said he wishes he could remember what dracula said verbatim, then proceeded to write dracula's long speech in quotes. 🤷🏻‍♀️ so did he paraphrase or remember every word? it made me wish stoker just wrote the story in 3rd person to better immerse the reader into the story and still be able to tell us how the character(s) felt and thought. i was interested in the story but finding out that the other chapters are more laborious to get through than jonathan's makes my mind up. i've been on the fence about DNF-ing this book and i'm ready to let it go. lol. i respect it for the classic that it is but i think i'll move on to other classics that are more enjoyable to read. 🤓

Thank you!

Thank you this is very helpful!

Hello ive been watching your videos about book clubs and I have a question about engaging in the conversation. I never know what to say and end up going quiet, making me lose points. Do you have better tips for understanding a book better and forming debate questions? because that's something I struggle with a lot

Great video

Just started reading the book and was struggling. The suggestions are really helpful. I had been keeping a list of the characters as it's quite confusing, seems ,I'm not the only one 😅.

Finished DC tonight after reading for over a year. I agree with your take on the “flagging“ at times. I found that I got through the first 3/4 of the book easier than I did the last quarter. And I KNEW he’d end up with Agnes in the end!

I think you didn’t remember the part about the woman who ends your life becoming the mother in your next life because it comes a full 50 pages after the pages for this video! Thanks for the great videos, I’ve been watching while I’m reading along, and I am very happy to have some different points of view.

Great questions! I am going to start a book club because the last 2 book clubs I tried fell flat in the discussion area. One club used the discussion guides which seems to use more close-ended question, thus no discussion. The other club was more for socializing and less about the book we read. Several times I felt like only 2 of us read the book.

Happy new year :)

I saw the earlier uploaded, and immediately I thought “looks like this is the unedited version” hahah so waited a little bit and here it is :)

I love a book with good humor!! I love Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not The Time to Panic. How Ya’ll Doing by Leslie Jordan is wonderful (recommend the audiobook). Katherine Center’s The Bodyguard is one a humorous, light read. Do you have a video dedicated to your favorite humorous reads? Count me in for more funny books!

Very good video❤

Great introduction for the book! Going to start reading it today!!

Excellent tips! Thank you so much for this

Vanity Fair was hard for me to follow, mostly because I still had a hard time understanding Victorian Era literature. Was still developing the...ear for it. By the time I was on Jane Eyre, I think I finally got it down, because after 5-6 novels of the era, I understood EVERYTHING and very well. Wow! Took me by surprise how well I was able to follow it. Masterpiece. So your read-alone series really helped me to tie up those loose ends I missed while struggling to follow along.

I read the waves and I enjoyed it. I understood it even though It was a bit confusing. I thought To The Lighthouse would be easier because its shorter but I was wrong. Thanks for this.

I already have a note to check out Alex Prud'Homme's The Ripple Effect. It sounds like Down River would be a good companion read.

Exhalation. I felt the same.

This is amazing ❤

Very nice video thank you.

I liked how in the TV series they spoke of downloading Wikipedia etc. They created electricity through solar panels and I have over 500 books on my Kindle app, so I know it's not as romantic as hardcover books, but I'd choose that! If not, then Jane Eyre, Their Eyes Were Watching God and either The Poisonwood Bible or a book of Mary Oliver poetry.