Cannibalism simile in White-Jacket

I came across this draft from June, which I couldn’t finish as we didn’t have internet in the new apartment. 
An interesting simile from chapter 15 of White-Jacket: 

“I sometimes thought that the junks of lean pork—which were boiled in their own bristles, and looked gaunt and grim, like pickled chins of half-famished, unwashed Cossacks—had something to do with creating the bristling bitterness at times prevailing in our mess. The men tore off the tough hide from their pork, as if they were Indians scalping Christians.”

Grim. 
What does it say about the novel? 
  

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Meanwhile, I’m reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, after giving up on Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno. 
What are you reading?