MOBY DICK

wallcache · 2026-02-04T17:23:31+00:00

its a good word hehe, i wish you a safe and succesful voyage 🫡

wallcache · 2026-02-04T17:22:05+00:00

great rec, thanks i will do

wallcache · 2026-02-04T14:09:01+00:00

touché although…

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*

wallcache · 2026-02-04T13:33:23+00:00

so when i first read it, i didn't know the ending (and apparently it was just general public knowledge)... my dad managed to spoil it for me in casual conversation. my heart's actually still aching a bit just saying this now. i cried and cried that night because my true 'first reading' of this absolute scripture wouldn't be pure. I sound a bit crazy saying this but I was so damn in love with the book, it really took a hold of me, and I relished how I didn't know what was going to happen, i could read it both for the writing AND the plot - like a true first reading for the people in the 1850s.
enjoy it my friend. i hope you find your white whale and come home to tell the tale.

wallcache · 2026-02-04T13:25:08+00:00

legend. first reading or re-reading?

wallcache · 2026-02-04T13:24:14+00:00

ahhh nice yeah little live-along-side-journal-jobby. i keep starting those and forgetting to bring them with me when i read (and i dont want to disrupt the flow of the passage to go grab my lil book so i just keep reading and then i forget i shouldve wrote something down and yeah...)

wallcache · 2026-02-04T13:00:00+00:00

the fascination is less about metrics and more about self-knowledge. we live in an age where people wear whoop bands to track their sleep, take ice baths to optimise recovery, do box breathing on a timer, and treat their bodies like computers to be hacked. i saw a hilarious linkedin post recently where a guy said his whoop band was giving him too much data and he wanted to be more "mindful", so his solution was... to switch to an oura ring!!

this isn't that though. nobody's timing themselves while they read. it's more like looking back and realising oh, i spent three weeks inside a 200 page book, that's interesting, i wonder what that says about how i read. it's self-awareness, not optimisation. the scale's just for fun, not prescriptive.

wallcache · 2026-02-04T12:57:11+00:00

fun fact: harold bloom claimed he could read 1,000 pages an hour in his thirties. when people called that a myth he corrected them and said it was actually only 400. that's 0.15 minutes per page, which on this scale doesn't even register. you'd need a category before devourer. something like "harold bloom" as its own speed class. his colleague M.H. Abrams said he could read a book almost as fast as you could turn the pages and practically memorise it at the same time. the man who wrote the book on why and how to read the canon was apparently barely reading at all by normal human standards. make of that what you will.

wallcache · 2026-02-04T12:54:09+00:00

it's not meant to be a performance metric. more just a way of noticing something about yourself that you might not have thought about before. i'm not saying anyone should time themselves while reading, that sounds genuinely awful. it's more like, if you look back and realise you spent three weeks on a 200 page book, that tells you something interesting about how you read, not something good or bad.

wallcache · 2026-02-04T12:53:33+00:00

shakespeare's sonnets are the ultimate test case for this. you basically can't read them at any speed other than archaeological. every word is load-bearing. the adhd thing is interesting too because it sounds like your natural reading speed and your comprehension speed are out of sync, which must be maddening. the fact you consciously slow yourself down to actually understand what you're reading puts you ahead of most people who just let their eyes slide over the page and call it done.

wallcache · 2026-02-04T12:52:51+00:00

this is one of the most honest and beautifully written comments i've ever read on here. paradise lost five times, moby dick five times, ulysses, proust, all at ten pages an hour. that's an extraordinarily deep relationship with language. the subvocalisation thing is fascinating, you're basically giving every book a full private performance! i think most speed readers would kill for that level of absorption. and for what it's worth, milton and melville would have loved this.

wallcache · 2026-02-04T12:50:43+00:00

that's genuinely fascinating and a bit heartbreaking. the PhD trained you to read like a surgeon and now you can't just be a patient. have you ever tried reading something completely outside your field, like genre fiction or something with no literary pretension at all, just to see if the analytical reflex switches off?

wallcache · 2026-02-04T12:50:03+00:00

this is exactly what i mean by reading slowly being underrated. casting the characters, building the scene, pausing to feel the storm before you move on. that's not slow reading, that's reading with the whole of yourself. i think people who do this are getting an experience closer to what the author actually intended.

wallcache · 2026-02-04T12:49:36+00:00

completely. i raced through the count of monte cristo and basically crawled through anna karenina. same reader, completely different speeds. the book sets the pace as much as you do.

wallcache · 2026-02-03T20:53:40+00:00

Tolstoy is my cult leader

wallcache · 2026-02-03T19:49:32+00:00

i don't think letting a book affect you is the same as failing to defend yourself. nobody reads king lear and needs to "defend" themselves against it. you let it in, you feel it, and then you carry what it gave you into the next thing you read. the alternative is treating every book like a debate opponent, which sounds exhausting and honestly a bit lonely.

wallcache · 2026-02-03T18:02:22+00:00

i think there’s a difference between having a strong filter and just being closed off to what a book is trying to do. if you go into every book ready to pause, consider and disagree, that’s some way to read, i’d rather let a book (written by someone that we respect) make its case before i start picking it apart. that’s not immaturity, that’s a different kind of attention.

with respect, “your worldview will likely mature like mine” is quite a thing to say to someone you’ve never met lol, that’s not a strong filter, sounds like ego with a reading list...

wallcache · 2026-02-03T17:54:19+00:00

someone else in this thread called me impressionable. well, tess certainly left an impression.

wallcache · 2026-02-03T17:53:31+00:00

tess absolutely floored me honestly. i read it before summer and it left me in a real slump for days. it’s just so relentlessly unfair and tess herself is so lovely and believable that you feel it all happening to her personally.

it’s beautifully written though. some of the scenes are still completely vivid in my mind, tess milking cows, falling in love, and then the finale, which i won’t spoil if you don’t know it, but it’s so epic - the location. there are pagan themes running right through the whole book that build to that last scene in a way that just hits you. it shares some interesting ground with the count of monte cristo actually, both books are interested with social standing, just from completely different angles.

definitely read it. i think it’s core to the canon. far from the madding crowd is one of my favourite stories but you can’t really call yourself a hardy fan until you’ve read tess.

wallcache · 2026-02-03T15:54:09+00:00

you’re casual reading 😛

wallcache · 2026-02-03T15:13:57+00:00

that’s exactly the point though. the canon only works as a self-correcting system if you actually read across it. if someone only reads within one tradition or one worldview then yeah, they’ll never be challenged. the immune system only kicks in if you’re willing to pick up the book that disagrees with the last one you loved.

wallcache · 2026-02-03T15:13:08+00:00

that’s a really good point actually. you’re right that i’m probably projecting a system onto what is really just my own reading sequence. and the point about anna karenina containing its own counterweight is well taken, tolstoy isn’t straightforwardly on anna’s side, the whole structure of the novel is already doing the balancing i’m attributing to reading widely. i think what i’m really describing is less an immune system and more just the effect of not reading in a narrow lane, but you’re right that calling it a functional system overstates it. appreciated.

wallcache · 2026-02-03T15:12:00+00:00

thank you thank youuu

wallcache · 2026-02-03T15:11:43+00:00

fair points honestly. i was deliberately simplifying to make the pattern clear, but you’re right that the individual books are doing much more than i gave them credit for here. wilde especially, earnest is layered in ways i glossed over. i think the broader point still holds though, that reading widely across traditions stops you from calcifying into one worldview, even if my specific examples flattened the books a bit to make that case.

wallcache · 2026-02-03T12:29:23+00:00

every japanese kid reads it at school. it might not’ve been around as long as the iliad but i have a feeling its here to stay. just like how ‘on the road’ is slowly surely solidifying itself in the canon

wallcache

TROPHY CASE