Hellbent

Krispy said:

Don't scratch it. And if you like Moby Dick, I might recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In my opinion, it's slightly less wordy.

I may read it next. I've always been at least somewhat intrigued with the book, but never attempted reading it. Here is a rather interesting tidbit about Jules Verne per Wikipedia:

In 1863, Jules Verne wrote a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century about a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network, yet cannot find happiness and comes to a tragic end. Hetzel thought the novel's pessimism would damage Verne's then-booming career, and suggested he wait 20 years to publish it. Verne put the manuscript in a safe, where it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. It was published in 1994, and around the same time many other Verne novels and short stories were also published for the first time, and these too are gradually appearing in English translation.

EDIT:

these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.

Deathmatches and a wad:

To fascinate us, sperm whales do not require vengeful tempers, like that possessed by Herman Melville’s fictional white leviathan, Moby Dick, though some controversial new research suggests they may indeed have a mean streak. Their swollen, gourdlike heads contain the planet’s largest brain and a prodigious reservoir of once highly prized spermaceti. They can plunge 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface in grand hour-long dives to feast on, among other things, giant squid, which are believed to use their sharp parrotlike beaks to gouge the whales’ snouts in death matches in the deep dark.

http://www.kevinroderick.com/whales.html

Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. --Moby Dick

EDIT: In my estimation, Herman Melville was grammatically challenged. Someone please read this sentence with exaggerated stresses to make clear its meaning and grammar; I very much doubt you can make the sentence make sense:

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the near vicinity of the straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake.

How the sentence should read:

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the near vicinity of the straits of Sunda (indeed, as most of the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising), and as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake.

Well, I finished Moby Dick. Not convinced it's the seminal American novel, but it definitely has some good aspects to it. Here are some amusing words Melville uses that I felt like jotting down as I read it.:


abaft
ablutions
abstemious
apoplexy
apotheosis
archiepiscopacy
argosy
acerbities
avast
baronial
betokened
bivouacks
camphorated
circumambient
circumambulate
clayey
confabulations
costermongers
demigorgon
demoniac
enfeebled
entablatures
evinced
flambeaux
gam
grandiloquent
gudgeons
hippogriff
imperturbable
integument
judgmatically
kith and kin
magniloquent
medicament
metempsychosis
miscreants
monstrousest
obsequious
offing
osseous
palavering
pestiferously
plaguy
pugnacious
punctilious
quiescent
quoggy
remonstrances
scaramouch
scorbutic
snow-howdahed
somnambulistic
terraqueous
twigged
unctuous
unenervated
verity
waggish