A Tale of Two Cities vs The Silmarillion vs Moby Dick

[Kris Brass]

Which is the best written?

[Lokasenna]

Can we settle for saying that they are all written quite differently?

[ajvenigalla]

All are written differently, but Moby-Dick's prose seems more fun and experimental, so if that's what you like, I'd pick Moby-Dick.

[bounty]

I like lokasenna's answer to the question. I might be answering a different question then.

I hated moby dick; probably even more than I hated a catcher in the rye.

I tried reading the silmarillion once and found it more or less incomprehensible.

a tale of two cites was accessible, made sense, and was on the whole, enjoyable.

[Danik 2016]

A Tale of Two Cities was for a long time my favorite book.
I like Moby Dick's symbolic force but maybe it is a bit too extensive.
I didn´t read The Silmarillion.
But I also agree with Lokasenna. This are three very different books with distinct backgrounds. Two of them are classics from the 19th century (one of them English the other from the USA). The Silmarillion
was published in the seventies.

[prendrelemick]

The Nantucket chapters of Moby Dick. Ok the pitch and style of the writing doesn't alter much after that, but Melville turns from the story a little too often for me, and I think pace and narrative are as important as the technical content in "writing".

The realization of the characters in Tale of Two Cities is, as usual with Dickens, brilliant. The way Madame DeFarge emerges so menacingly from the page is a tour de force of how to create a fully formed character with (a few) words.

I haven't read The Silmarillion.

[kev67]

I read the Silmarillion at the second attempt when I was a teenager. Probably what made it easier was that I had gone through a religious phase and had read the King James Old Testament. It is written in a similar style to Genesis. I did not like the Tale of Two Cities so much as other of Dickens' books. I think this was largely because it was easy to spot the major plot twist from about half the book in, plus the end notes more or less gave it away. I have not read Moby Dick yet, but I hope to this year.

[Jackson Richardson]

i read and re-read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager. I re-read it a few years back and thought how corny the "heroic" bits with the Men of Rohan are with their cod King James prose. I've only looked briefly in The Simarillion in a bookshop. Half way down page one I saw a paragraph starting "And it came to pass..."

O no, I thought and read no further.

I agree with kev that Tale of Two Cities is not as enjoyable as other Dickens. It is his least typical novel to my mind. It lacks the vulgarity of much of his other work and at the same time misses the energy. It has been said it is the favourite Dickens novel of readers who don't appreciate Dickens.

I haven't read Moby Dick for years and it's not my thing really, but of the three must be the one with the most impressive and individual prose style.

So on that basis it is the "best written".

[desiresjab]

I am still trying to decide between Old Man and the Sea and Rememberance of Things Past.