What are you reading these days?

I have a bad habit of starting a book, getting halfway through, and then starting another one while still maintaining my intention to finish the first book. Right now, this means that I'm actively reading Moby Dick (Herman Melville, 1851), The Waves (Virginia Woolf, 1931), and Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937). It's convenient to be able to switch off what I'm reading depending on my mood, but it can also be confusing (I usually try to keep it to one fiction and one nonfiction book). I suppose the benefit is that I'm able to make a lot of interesting meta-comparisons between texts if I read them concurrently.

Moby Dick is interesting to me for any number of reasons. I'm quite taken with the power of Melville's language; it's rare for me to be so thoroughly engaged with both heightened emotional speeches and mundane descriptions of life on a whaling vessel, like the way the captain tends to literally stand at the helm of his ship or the micro-interactions between crewmates. As for the former, certainly the intent is to build up the statures of characters like Ahab and Moby Dick to a nearly mythical point (I am reminded somewhat of Homer's Odyssey, insofar as Odysseus is legendarily hyped up early on). I was initially apprehensive about the book's racial subthemes, but upon progressing in the text have begun to lean toward a much more charitable analysis. Although nominally rooted in European stereotypes, there is a lot of nuance in the way that Melville actually describes the character of figures like Queequeg, who is my personal favorite. I'm excited to get further into the narrative of Moby Dick, and I imagine I'll be re-reading it sooner or later too.

I'm very interested in Woolf's exploration of singular/interwoven consciousnesses as laid out in The Waves. The stream of consciousness can be difficult to follow at times, although I suppose that's kind of the point. I think I have a good idea of what Woolf is getting at with the text—that is, a commentary on the role of the individual (or pseudo-individual, as the case may be) in what she conceives of as a restrictive or narrowly defined society, and conversely the implicit perversion of the former by the latter—but nevertheless I feel that this is the sort of book I'll have to re-read more than once to really understand. Woolf is often criticized in academic circles for being classist, racist, etc., and that's probably valid, but I can still appreciate the metaphysics of this sort of ultra-internal work. The book's themes allow me to consider how I tend to conceive of myself in relation to others in a way that's challenging to describe, but remarkable.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is written almost entirely in dialect (AAVE), and I see why that might've sparked criticism among progressives at the time of its publication, but I find it much easier to place myself in the world as described through the protagonist Janie's eyes if I'm not provided an illusion of the way people live—I believe linguistic semantics to be a big part of that. The phoneticism of the dialogue provides a better sort of context for some of the vocabulary characters use with each other. By contrast, this use of language also serves the opposite purpose of reminding me how distant I am from the people described in the book, both historically (particularly in its consideration of poverty and occupation) and contemporaneously (I do not identify with the positionality of the characters). It's almost a reality check: "Keep up the good fight, but remember who (what) you are and aren't" (I often feel this way when I engage with activist movements in under-advantaged communities). It's naturally a pretty grounded text, but—and perhaps this is just due to my reading it in conjunction with The Waves—I'm tempted to read the novel's interplay between physicality and soul in a somewhat high-minded way. For example, it was suggested to me in a recent conversation that what was "between the lines" of the raw experience laid out in Their Eyes Were Watching God is at some level analogous to the descriptive interludes present throughout The Waves. In this sense, they each serve as the frames of reference for the sort of "post-language" (or maybe "pre-language") knowledge about ourselves and our co-inhabitants that we can always intuit but never elucidate.

Unrelated to the above, I'm thinking about getting an Audible subscription soon. I much prefer the experience of reading a physical book—I love the way they smell and feel, and I just like owning them—but I do notice how much time I could be making better use of every day by listening to a book in a situation where I wouldn't normally sit down and read it. Probably I'll end up using this to listen to non-fiction that would otherwise bore me.