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NocturnOmega t1_j0r1c20 wrote

Reply to comment by Jenniferinfl in Is the handmaid's tale poorly written? by Singto_

I can understand not liking parts of Moby Dick, it can be quite meandering, but what about the first chapters or Ismaels meeting with Quequeg? That imo was pretty top notch and a treat to read. There’s a lot of parts where the narrator bangs on about old archaic whaling terms and instrumentation, but the tedium I don’t think was apparent all throughout the book.

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Jenniferinfl t1_j0r74ue wrote

There were parts of it that were great. I can't help but feel I would have loved an abbreviated version without all the archaic whaling terms and wildly inaccurate whale facts.

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NocturnOmega t1_j0rnuhe wrote

Wildly inaccurate whale facts? Lol. They were going off what they knew at the time. I hear you though, I dnf’d it years back for those exact reasons, but I’m so glad I went back and finished it. An abridged version just wouldn’t be the same. Sometime after I finished the novel, I saw a YouTube video about a Nantucket whaling vessel and the person in the video was going over all the trinkets and what worker did what and where on the boat, and while watching I literally could call out everything the person said before they said it. It was kinda cool, I didn’t really appreciate the lil things in the novel at first, but it’s really like a snap shot of a time and place.

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