I graduated with an English B.A., and I took a course where the professor was a Melville scholar. I was required to read Moby Dick (in its painful entirety), Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener.

I cannot imagine a more overrated writer.

Thank God! I thought I was just too thick to appreciate Melville. Well maybe thats true anyway, but it still is nice to hear others found this guy vastly overrated.

Moby Dick? A very strange boring book about whaling.

There I said it.

By the way, be sure to share that Budd!

In the same way, One True pointed out to me, a Cajun hunter still lived on a houseboat in Simmesport, and a bush-hippie hunter was waiting in reserve in a hand-built cabin in Homer.

The moral is that the resistance to a rich vocabulary is inconsistently exercised. When the talk is of scientific or mechanical things, the public is altogether acquiescent to strange and minutely differentiated terms. Is this what Mr. Burgess is saying? -- that the difficulty in making distinctions in human and social affairs leads people to Tarzan-talk in the classroom? The same people who can talk to the hi-fi people with maximum scientific sophistication? Worth musing, between the holidays.

Buckley: The Right Word

From Bertrand Russell's Our Knowledge of the External World (purchased in my philosophy-major college days, when I swear I had every intent to actually read it; edited for length):

Evolutionism, if what has been said is true, is to be regarded as a hasty generalization from certain rather special facts, accompanied by a dogmatic rejection of all attempts at analysis, and inspired by interests which are practical rather than theoretical. In spite, therefore, of its appeal to detailed results in various sciences, it cannot be regarded as any more genuinely scientific than the classical tradition which it has replaced. How philosophy is to be rendered scientific, and what is the true subject-matter of philosophy, I shall try to show first by examples of certain achieved results, and then more generally.... I shall not, however, adopt the method of independent inquiry, starting from what, in a pre-philosophic stage, appear to be facts, and keeping always as close to these initial data as the requirements of consistency will permit.

To become more degraded and slovenly would have been difficult; but Raskolnikov even enjoyed it in his present state of mind. He had decidedly withdrawn from everyone, like a turtle into its shell, and even the face of the maid who had the task of serving him, and who peeked into his room occasionally, drove him to bile and convulsions. This happens with certain monomaniacs when they concentrate too long on some one thing. It was two weeks since his landlady had stopped sending food up to him, but it had not yet occured to him to go and have a talk with her, though he was left without dinner. Nastaya, the landlady's cook and only servant, was glad in a way that the tenant was in such a mood, and stopped tidying and sweeping his room altogether; only once a week, just by accident, she would sometimes take a besom to it. It was she who woke him now.

Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky

Good thing you didn't say 29, it was an English-Spanish dictionary!

This is the second time I have read something about putting books on shelves, but no one ever seems to answer the question of once you do that, what do you pile in the corner?

Stephen,

I'm here to help. The answer to your question is......bills!