Billy Budd and Other Stories

http://sarahbbc.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/billy-budd-other-stories-hermann-melvil... ( )

I had to read Billy Budd for school. That is not really a deal breaker for me, but I just did not get the point of the story and it really seems like it is suppose to have a point. ( )

Very difficult story to read, with Melville often distracted from the task at hand. However, if you can persevere the fabulous story manages to shine through the verbose prose. ( )

Anyone who could ever in good conscience write and publish a sentence like the following (from "Benito Cereno"):

"But whatever misgivings might have obtruded on first seeing the stranger, would almost, in any seaman's mind, have been dissipated by observing that, the ship, in navigating into the harbor, was drawing too near the land; a sunken reef making out off her bow."

should be taken out and shot. Provides some interesting food for literary analysis, but I never will be able to figure out how someone who achieved perhaps one coherent, flowing, well-written sentence out of every hundred ever came to be considered a "classic" writer.

collection of stoies by Herman Melville ( )