bibliographing

A couple more new charts today. First, I’d been wanting to look at the length of the books I was reading. I know I read a lot of pretty short ones, and I was actually a little surprised to note the concentration between 200 and 300 pages. I guess those are your “normal” books but [...]

Coming up on the end of the year, I wanted to revisit some of the graphs I made back in May.
Voici my 2009 reading, in order, with original publication dates plotted. This has been pretty nicely expanded since the last time I graphed it, and I actually had to throw out a few dates (everything [...]

Read my most recent review for The Front Table, of Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson.

After regaling you with mediocrity for the week (but I liked Mardi!), today we’ll have the most disappointing bit of the novel, for me. Melville really fails here.
Now, there’s a lot you don’t know about because I haven’t mentioned (tons of blogging fodder if I’m still at it when I do a re-read), including the [...]

I’ll give you a nicer bit of Mardian satire to show that Melville wasn’t only caught up in the minutiae of current affairs circa 1848. Perhaps my favorite is the story of the Mindarian sorcerers.
If a Mindarian deemed himself aggrieved or insulted by a countryman, he forthwith repaired to one of these sorcerers; who, for [...]

You would think, given Mardi’s status as the book that started Melville’s unpopularity, that contemporary critics panned it. Or at least, I had thought that they, along with Melville’s normal readers, felt betrayed by this turn into such strange and muddled territory. But according to the historical note in my edition, reviews were mixed but [...]

Is Mardi a catastrophe? I don’t think I would go that far. It’s a mess, and not a success. It has me very excited to get to Moby-Dick again, but not any less excited about Melville’s other work. And (standard caveats about predicting the future here) I will certainly read it again at some point.
Between [...]

Melville’s first three books all begin with a sailorly transgression on the part of the narrator(/Melville figure). In Typee, which I knew to be at least somewhat autobiographical, I was so taken aback by the fact that it began with a runaway I had to immediately check whether that part was accurate (it was). I [...]

This grey and dreary morning, Mardi was conquered! Brace yourselves for a week of that then, as I may have the same problem as Melville—not being able to shut up about it.
As I mentioned last week, Mardi is long. At this point, I feel like it is loooong. In other words, it’s really put a [...]

As my friend has already investigated, Melville does not really sound like Melville until the, ahem, quite crazy Mardi. Now, when I started out with Typee and continued through Omoo, I was ready to object—hey, this is (a) super good and (b) really funny. And having just read The Piazza Tales, I could certainly see [...]