I Can't Do It!

A few years back I finally read Moby Dick. (Here's what I thought about it!) It took me 5 attempts to get through the book! I know it's a classic and everything but Melville is boring! You don't even see the whale until page 576!

I've recently tried to get into Melville's The Confidence Man. I can't do it! His writing is too... I don't know what! It's hard to follow, he writes run on sentences, and then compounds them with too much detail! I explained it to Sara that I feel as if I am reading a foreign language half the time. I'll read a page and then realize I have no idea what has happened.

Here's an example:

"As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man."


Actually, the above paragraph, from Chapter 2, was one of the passages I enjoyed from the less than 5 chapters I read before throwing in the towel. I don't know if I'll feel the need to come back and try again later, but for now I'm saying no to this classic. Melville is not my friend!