ishmael.

i FINALLY finished reading moby dick.

my first feeling was that i hated it. it took me so long to read it. and it's not a hard read, it just has some super boring parts. while i read it, i enjoyed it. there was just nothing interesting enough about it to compel me to pick it up and read more the next day. so i gave myself an assignment...read 10 pages a day.

it's true. i give myself assignments.

the nerdiness gets worse from here.

when i read a book, i dog-ear pages with neato quotes. when i finish the book, i go back and read those quotes. (in some books i underline...it's a system i don't feel like explaining...) while i was reading those quotes, i realized this book is really great. and i understand why it's a classic american novel.

i began to think about all the different reports i could write, if i were a student being forced to read this book. there are so many different ways i could go! the obvious topic is ahab's character, and how his quest to kill moby dick destroys him. blah blah. there are also a lot of really great secondary characters to focus on. the literary style is very british, in my opinion. but i wouldn't know how to explain that. he just expresses some stuff in a really funny, british way. really good imagery. there's also the topic of how he takes parts of the whale or parts of the sea and turns them into a metaphor for something neato. and my personal favorite are the ideas that are very Christian. that would be a fun paper to write.

and the strange thing is i hate writing papers.

but i'm glad my mind is still sharp in my old age, and i could still whip out a paper if i needed to.

i was going to choose a few quotes to share, but there's too many. there's an entire chapter devoted to whale sperm, and trust me, you don't want me to go there.