Here's what i've been reading lately—mostly just books, but perhaps a singular short story or essay if I find it particularly striking.
Every bit as sprawling, discursive, and idiosyncratic a I had heard, but also surprisingly emotional, philosophical, and humorous. The general image of this book as "a crazy guy hunts a whale in between boring chapters on nautical terminology" could not be more distorted. Melville exercises his command over the English language with the same total control as Ahab exerts on his crew, and the sentence-to-sentence construction of each chapter was so captivating that I could have read a full book in the same voice about simple whale facts.
As I read I followed along with Robin VanGilder's chapter-by-chapter blogposts on the book. I found his focus on the character of Ishmael as narrator (the book is really more about the Ishmael writing it than it is the Ahab acting it out) and his obsessive desire for information very enlightening. This angle added yet another inch of blubber to the dense coating of faith, fate, and nature themes which hug the book's bones.