White Whales, TRUST, and Should This be a Book?
A few words of writing advice at the end
One Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Progress: Days 1, Pages 6
Six Observations in Six Pages
1: “Call me Ishmael” is an amazingly weird opening line.
It sounds like a friend’s parent telling you to drop the “Mr.” or a businessman gripping your hand and introducing themselves before you can get a word in. The iconic opening line of Moby-Dick is such a strange and interesting choice; Melville could have just written “My name is” or described Ishmael or something that happened to Ishmael or something Ishmael did. It definitely sets the tone early, that none of the word or phrasing choices are going to be obvious going forward.
For comparison, here’s how three other random, more modern, classics introduce their protagonists.
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson:
“Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, live in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother in their incomprehensible actions.”
Beloved by Toni Morrison:
“For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.”
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis:
“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard.”
These are all fantastic, hardly ordinary. But none are as atypical, anti-descriptive, or purely tonally odd as “Call me Ishmael.”
2: Ishmael argues that the ocean is the best the natural world has to offer, proving early on he is delusional.
I’m not afraid to say it: the ocean is definitely not the best part of nature. While Ishmael heads off the glaring issue of seasickness by saying you have to sign up to be a sailor not a passenger, he really misses the boat by fixating on the sea. If he had simply argued that water is the greatest part of the natural world, the case would be open and shut—you need water to live, it’s nice to look at, refreshing. But a big, endlessly monotonous, salty death trap? The 1800s must have been pretty bleak if the ocean was their idea of a fun adventure.
It’s not too late to start, we’re only six pages in. Don’t you want an adventure at high sea?
3: Melville predicts the future.
Here is a passage that mirrors exactly the events that would take place 150 years after the novel was published:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.”
“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL”
“BLOODLY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN”
Does that make George W. Bush Ishmael? The metaphor doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch.
4: Best oddball fragments
“Call me Ishmael” isn’t Melville’s only idiosyncratic way of putting things. These little snippets of sentences are wonderful:
“two orchard thieves.” (This is in reference to Adam and Eve; I love how this allusion rhymes with its reference point, as in: two orchard thieves, Adam and Eve.)
“to get a still better seaward peep”
“where he rolled his island bulk”
“like a snow hill in the air” (Describing the white whale.)
And my personal favorite:
“judgmatically salted”
5 & 6: Two great pieces of life advice
It’s better in life to be the sailor rather than the passenger.
It’s better to be paid than to have to pay.
House Keeping
Reminder if you want to read along:
-Weekdays only.
-A chapter a day or as many pages before you get distracted or have an obligation.
-No fretting.
Bestseller Intrigue: Trust!
After appearing on approximately one million “best of” lists Trust by Hernan Diaz makes the tail end of the bestseller list at #15 an astonishing eight months after it came out. But it doesn’t matter: whether your book lands the #2 or #15 slot, it earns one of the most important selling tools a book can have: “New York Times bestseller” printed on the book cover, and “New York Times bestselling author” for life. It seems as if by sheer critical mass of reviewer and award attention, Trust has risen to the top of enough people’s reading piles. In other bestseller news: Harry is unsurprisingly #1 and Leigh Bardugo must have written a helluva a book because this is one of the scariest covers I’ve ever seen on a #1 bestselling novel.
Should this be a book?
No.
A little background. When you’re an editor or in the publishing business generally, you become programmed to try to squeeze everything into the round peg that for you is a string of 60,000 or more connective words. You watch a comedy special, read a local news story, see a cute dog, or drink a nice glass of wine and ask yourself—should this be a book?
I’m very late to this—the account was started in 2007—but JxmyHighroller is a phenomenal creator of basketball shorts on YouTube. He uses real clips, stats, and excellent voice-over narration (he’s got an amazing voice, which helps) to make great points, usually about astonishing things that have happened in the NBA, put into their historical context. But this definitively shouldn’t be a book—it’s so much more dramatic and better storytelling as a voiced-over video. One of my favorite JxmyHighroller moves wouldn’t work in a book: he’ll show a dot graph and start at the bottom—naming a few players who did some impressive feat. Then he’ll slowly crawl upwards on the graph as he narrates, until you get to the punch line: a dot that shows you Michael Jordan’s point on the graph that is leagues away from every other player in history.
If there is a free book idea out of JxmyHighroller’s videos, it’s for a fancy art book publisher to do the book version of The Last Dance documentary. As in: an unapologetically Jordan-is-the-greatest-ever, worshiping, four-color shrine with all these insane graphs and photographs. You could sell it for $500 dollars with a pair of shoes.
A Few Words of Writing Advice: Don’t Use Italics
Never employ italics for more than a paragraph in a row; it will drive your reader crazy. What the difference is, between putting your prologue in italics verses roman, personally, I’ll never understand—trust me, your writing will be just as moody and profound if the letters aren’t wobbly. Resort to another font, if you have to, first. I’m very sorry to whomever I can’t thank because I don’t remember where I first heard this advice, but it has stuck. (If you’re an octogenarian who has written some great books, you can break this rule.)
Back Matter: Links and Other Happenings
“She told him she was going to be the worst employee he ever had. ‘And she lived up to it.’” Does reading books give you fashion sense? I like Mieke Chew’s (subtly savage) answer (and great outfit). Inside the failed PRH bid for Simon & Schuster. Two anticipated fiction adaptations premier at Sundance. If you’re tired of books: a beautifully done, infographic guide on what TV to stream. The TV show “White House Plumbers” beat out every book publishing in 2023 for GQ’s top 12 pop culture things to look forward to (for a total of 0 books).