Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

It came to be, in the winter of this year, that, having finished Herbert’s Dune and seeking something new to read, though not yet ready to read Dune Messiah, I came upon an untouched paperback in my bookcase, and, willing to plunge into a nautical adventure, I began reading Moby Dick. This being so, I, prepared to read a legendary classic and unaware of the Goliathan task before me, embarked upon a thee month navigation of dense prose which, in the end, I juggled with five other books; Stoker’s gothic masterpiece Dracula, for I am subscribed for the Dracula Daily newsletter; Crummey’s Sweetland, a novel I read with utmost haste to catch its adaptation ere it departed the silver screen; the aforementioned Dune Messiah, which I began late one evening when, finding myself tucked snugly in my bed and missing my copy of Moby Dick, I reached for the nearest book I had on hand; and ultimately God’s own Holy Bible, which I began reading for the express purpose of understanding the myriad of biblical references Miller employs. Nor was my reading in any way hastened — or indeed unimpeded — by the twisting, winding sentences one must reread twice ere grasping fully; a poetic labyrinth of prose one cannot parse without losing oneself of times; and the White Whale himself more terrible, more loathsome than any mere bull-headed Minotaur that Pasiphaë could muster! Alas, humble thyself Daedalus! Thy labyrinth may house a beast of Neptune’s own twisted design, but the Minotaur could do not but flail and drown when met with his elder brother, the leviathan!

I actually think about this a bit, I'd like to re-read it sometime to get more of the details down.
Audiobook was rather nice.

Лучшая книга всех времен и народов. Продублирую сюда свой обзор из ЖЖ:

«Киты.

Зовите меня Измаил.

Киты.

Ахуенная книга.

Киты.

Но я ее, сука, ненавижу.

Киты.

И как же я ее, сука, обажаю.

Киты.

Вот идут страницы сюжета. Вот они ни с того ни с сего прерываются описанием ВСЕГО что есть в китах. А давайте о нервной системе. А давайте об окраске. А давайте о спаривании. А давайте, сука, об одиночестве.

Киты.

Вы возненавидете эту книгу. Но что-то невероятно глубокое в вас, что-то метафизическое будет толкать дочитать ее. Главное ощущение от этой книги у меня сформировалось только сейчас, спустя несколько месяцев (сразу после прочтения я чувствовал ничего и все одновременно. Я просто не мог сказать чего-либо). Эта книга как-будто вовсе и не претендует на то, чтобы ее читали. Она не пытается увлечь вас. Ей плевать, стоит она у вас на полке или нет. Автору плевать, знаете вы о ней, или нет. Если все книги на земле сожгут — останется только она. Не в результате какого-то чуда или всеобщего голосования, а потому что она так решила. Она вне времени и пространства.

Киты.

Сюжет странный. Ее чтение как путешествие по пещере. По странной пещере. По пещере, которая знает все тайны вселенной, но не хочет рассказывать. Не из-за злого умысла. Не чтобы мы сами догадались. Ей просто это не интересно.

Киты.

Книга магическая.

Киты.

Ну и “Проклятие Моби Дика” сработало на мне. Теперь иногда, уже перед сном, на меня нападает аномальное желание срочно ее перечитать.


История безумного Ахава надолго в моей голове.».

This has been on my backlog since college. I bought it for an English course I took and we never got around to actually reading the book in the semester and I've held on to it all that time. I believe the reason our professor had assigned it to us was due to the attention to detail and the research into whaling.

Y'all I think Melville did a lot of research before writing this book. Just a bit.

2.5. Abridged.

This was my father’s favorite book. I have a vivid memory of him coming into my bedroom when I was about 6, and my brother 10, years of age insisting that we read it. However, upon seeing the depth of the book, I was immediately intimidated. It was only after my father’s death a couple years ago that I felt compelled to carry out my father’s wish of about three decades prior.

I am very conflicted. As a book it feels very disjointed; one part story, the other part academic, mashed together and related by theme but otherwise seemingly separate. I like both parts independently, but not together.

Additionally, I find Melville’s writing to be redundant, and not in a “oral storytelling tradition” sort of way, but rather in that he used multiple synonyms to describe the same thing. This seems highly inefficient, despite the actual prose being wonderfully poetic.

The characters are incredibly memorable, and well fleshed out. I was connected to each one, my favorite being the kind and loyal cannibal, Queequeg.

I am sure that once I dive deeper into understanding the symbolism and themes present in the book I will grow a deeper appreciation and respect for it, but currently I can not fathom someone reading this for leisure in 2024.

I loved all the homoerotic subtext, but the book really drags in the latter half.

In the words of Ed Hillary, returning to base camp from summiting Everest, “We knocked the bastard off,” and fairly quickly too.

So, what is there to say about this book that has had so much already written about it?
Did I enjoy reading it? I am unsure... I enjoyed some parts a lot, and in equal measure, there were parts I detested. But I have probably jumped ahead...

I am pretty sure I made an attempt at reading this before, but that memory is so vague I have not marked it so on GR. I know I never finished it, and I can't be sure if I even read enough pages to depart from Nantucket... but that is already quite an investment.

I recently read Nathanial Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, and Moby Dick is obviously referenced fairly heavily. That book was a five star read, cramming in so much whaling and nautical history into a comparatively short book, and it reminded me that Moby Dick was not a book I had successfully completed... so I thought I better tackle it. This book is similar, in that it includes far, far more than the narrative of the whale hunt.

Having recently injured my Achilles tendon, I have had the pleasure, without too much guilt, of lounging about on the couch reading. This allowed me to wallow in Moby Dick more than I would normally have been able to justify...

So to the parts I liked:
- This isn't ‘just' a novel. In fact large tracts if it don't fit into a fiction category at all. It is part scientific treatise, part history of whaling, part history of other random things, part choreographed stage play, part an exploration of mythology and of course part epic nautical adventure. Not only that, but it was all chopped in together.
- So I enjoyed significantly more the scientific and whaling history aspects that the others, but I found the hard transitions between various aspects were far less successful than those in Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea.
- Ishmael's narration - I have put this as a part I like, but it isn't without it's challenges. For the most part I enjoyed the narration of the story, but there were aspects told that he could not have had knowledge of. It is also ironic that Ishmael is such a minor character in the story itself, and for those who have read it the only one to survive!
- Queequeg, as a character was great, a South-Seas Polynesian, from fictional Kokovoko, via New Zealand as described by Ishmael. His bromance with Ishmael was hilarious. P45, “Better [to] sleep with sober cannibal than a drunken Christian”... ha.

And the parts I struggled with:
- Chapter 9, The Sermon. This just about curtailed my reading of this novel. If for some unknown reason, you are reading my review and considering the novel... do yourself a favour and feel free to skip over this chapter of pain.
- The regular changes in style left me, at times, baffled as to what I had just read. It was in places such dense stream-of-consciousness writing that it was practically unmanageable.
- There were whole tracks of text that I couldn't reconcile as being relevant to the narrative. Baffling and almost unintelligible pages... the denser they became the more my eyeballs turned back in their sockets...
- The convoluted repetition got to me too - describing a single event two or three times with different words - just move on already, Melville, you are using up pages!
- Bulkington - I mean, why? Near the start we are given a whole explanation of him and how he will be Ishmael's companion on the Pequod, yet other than one (very) brief mention, he doesn't feature again in the entire novel!
- Anyone who has read my reviews already knows my analysis is always pretty simple. I am not good with analogies; I despise psychological assessments; I don't identify with spiritual aspects. There was too much of this for me.

On balance I have given four stars, as the parts I enjoyed have outweighed the aspects I didn't enjoy. The encyclopedic examination of whaling and whales was fantastic and added another layer on what I learned from Philbrick.

The whole book I prayed for the whale to just appear and sink that ship and eat all of them. But when it did happen, it was way too short for this horrendous, gargantuan encyclopedia about 19th century whaling novel.
Yes, it has some nice prose and all, but that's it.

4.5 bordering on 5

total masterpiece. can't be understated how important this is as a foundation for the postmodern canon. Almost all of my favorite books are all indebted to Moby Dick in some way, ESPECIALLY Pynchon's work and House of Leaves

score may jump up as i listen to lectures and continue exploring this tome ☺️

When people hate this, I totally see why. When people love this, I see why. So it's right in the middle for me.

But damn. Herman never learned a fact he didn't tell you, never recalled an anecdote he didn't spring on you, never used one word when five would do. Ishmael is one overly verbose mofo.

You could read Moby Dick, or you could take a crackhead sailing, and it would be mostly the same experience.

so there's a point in this where it's all ‘this whale is a....' and it reminded me of the barbie memes and that was the best part

Could have been about 300 pgs shorter and would have been an enjoyable read. I got bogged down in specifics that didn't intrest me.

This is the only book I've ever read that I think I might actually have been better with an abridgement. The story is great and the language is beautiful, but over the course of the story, too much attention is given to supplemental chapters about technical details and historical information about whaling in general. While it may be interesting to some, many of these chapters add nothing to the story of Ishmael's adventures on the Pequod.

Very few people actually enjoy the experience of running a marathon, but when it's done they feel like they've got to brag about it and maybe they should. Moby-Dick has been on my list for about a decade and I couldn't get it done. Now it's done and I will absolutely be obnoxious about it

The greatest novel I have ever read and one that has become dearly important to me in the few months since I read it for the first time. A novel of breathtaking scope and scale, with an unparalleled vision and unrivaled prose styling.

I don't think this is the greatest book in the world but it is good and so very weird.

I came back from a holiday on Nantucket knowing more about 19th-century whaling than I ever expected to. And, because this is the kind of person I am, this inspired me to attempt Moby-Dick after having obligingly owned this copy of it since middle (?) school for reasons now lost to time. Realistically, I never thought I would read it. My track record with anything written prior to 1900 is poor, and, of course, I had been warned it is heavy on the whales and ships and stuff.

An Instagram caption is an improper medium for literary criticism, so all I will say is this. Relative to my priors, I have never been so blown away by a reading experience like the one that engulfed me at the end of each exhausting day, when I would lose myself in this strange & watery world for a few chapters. Set aside the musty overtones that accompany any Great American Novel. With prose that is kin to both Shakespeare's tragedies and Mozart's comic operas and a rambling narrative structure that abounds with sly pre-modern post-modernisms (the footnotes! the cetological asides!), it is as inventive as anything written today. Set aside as well the temptation to dismiss its metaphors as obvious. Melville's writing swings for the fences. It is maximalist and serious in a way that is impossible to imagine of contemporary fiction. As the Pequod wound its way through the southern seas, it struck me that Moby-Dick operates not in a symbolic register but rather a mythical one, with all the elemental wildness that entails. And that, too, makes it a radical book for the 21st-century reader.

I made a conscious effort to read more classic literature this year and this was top of my list. Unfortunately I was disappointed. What I was expecting was a swashbuckling high-seas adventure. What I got was an over-long, plodding narrative stuffed with excessive pseudo-scientific descriptions of the whaling industry. One hundred pages in and our narrator still hadn't set foot on a boat which only caught up with the fabled white whale in the last three chapters of the book (from page 514).

Intellectually, I find this a meandering, at times beautiful, frequently frustrating read. But emotionally I am a little fish who likes all the weird gay angry men.

I couldn't get into this book at various times when I've tried to read it. This time, I listened to the audiobook and I'm glad I did.

I'm not quite sure what to say about it, though. It's very long. It has some aspects to it that I would consider pretty serious flaws in other books.

And yet I found it incredibly tense and thought-provoking.

I'm glad I gave it another try.

«...only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.»

Wow this had a lot of depth to it. The story about a young author joining a whaling expedition quickly turns into a metaphor for the extent man is whiling to go to settle a score and prove a point. Melville does a great job layering great characters, places and imagery along the way. It's a long read but a great one for the next time you're on a cruise or boat trip ;)

I am surprised to say I will likely read this again.

This is such a beautifully written book. The beginning is wonderfully entertaining and fun to read. The middle of the book seems to really drag it becomes very aggressive. I found this book very educational but also very long. It is a book I would recommend reading in several small bites it would be challenging to read in one setting or even over a few days.