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Showing posts from September, 2022

From Failure to Greatness: The Story of Moby-Dick

The Melville Revival, which started in 1919, is the process of rediscovering Melville and Moby-Dick in particular. A few remarks on his career's decline are necessary before we proceed, though. First, Melville had great popularity with Typee (1846), his debut book, which was based on his own experience fleeing the Acushnet whaling ship and residing on the Marquesan island of Nuku Hiva. With over 16,000 copies sold during his lifetime.  Photo by Michal Wozniak on Unsplash Typee was by far his most popular album. Because of the exotic love affair in the narrative between the narrator, Tommo, and Fayaway, an inhabitant of the mythical country of the same name, Melville gained notoriety as the "guy who lived among the cannibals" and even turned into a sort of 19th-century sex symbol. His subsequent books continued to draw directly from his own life. The follow-up to Typee, Omoo, was based on his adventures leaving Nuku Hiva aboard the Lucy Ann whaling ship and participating i

What makes Harry Potter not so special to readers everywhere?

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what I disliked about the volumes that followed The Prisoner of Azkaban. I read them, or at least wanted to read them, to find out what occurred. My faults with the book may not be big defects, but I found them to detract from it. Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash To begin with, Harry Potter and his companions had to be the most pitiful magic users ever trained. Even Hermoine, who is portrayed as the smartest student in the school, is quite pitiful. Everyone in the previous generation seemed to be considerably more skilled by the time they graduated, or even before they graduated, from Hogwarts. James and company were skilled/powerful enough to create the Marauder's Map, which I doubt Hermoine (much alone Harry) could do if her life depended on it. Tom Riddle kept a notebook of his memories while he was still in sixth grade.  Even Snape was a proficient potion maker (to the point of modifying the recipes) and appeared to either know or produ