Moby Dick - Is anyone else struggling with this? - posted last year

I don't believe Moby Dick could get published today. It's not that it isn't a good story, and its message is probably quite profound. But the writing (which I believe *IS* characteristic of its era) is so ponderous, I couldn't stick with it. Although it has a famous opening hook ("Call me Ishmael"), by today's standards it gets off to an unforgivably slow start. A pretty hard and fast rule of writing modern fiction is to open the story as far into it as possible. In Moby Dick, we wander around New Bedford for what seems like days while nothing much happens, plotwise.