I'm reading two disaster stories in a row ('The Indifferent Stars Above' about the Donner party, and now 'In the Heart of the Sea' about the whaleship Essex).
animal cruelty is the worst for me, pretty bad in 'Stars' because those animals didn't ask to be there nor had any idea what they were experiencing nor could possibly be reassured things would get better or that they would have a better life afterwards. So it was particularly horrible reading about them being whipped or overworked or falling off of cliffs and crushed by wagons or dehydrated and starved to death, so I skipped as much as I could, especially later sections about them being slaughtered.
now 1/4 thru the Essex story, I'm happily skipping page after page of the gore & trashing from whales getting stabbed, which is effective. but the author laid in a sentence after the main boat sank which still ruined the morning a bit; they had some pigs for livestock, those pigs were already described as emaciated, and apparently two of the pigs somehow managed to swim out from under the sinking ship and meet the lifeboats. what the fuck are they gonna do now? get killed after all that effort surviving a shipwreck? pigs are smart, they didn't deserve this. hate it
by infieldmitt
2 Comments
Descriptions of dreams. Skip every time.
Maybe those books aren’t the best for you to be reading then? The treatment of animals is so woven into both of those stories that I’m not sure how you can skip such massive chunks of the book and still come away feeling like you got the whole story. At the end of the day, you read what you want to read, but if a topic is a) that distressing and b) that integral to the story, then maybe it’s safer to just skip the book.