This amazing tome contains everything you didn't think you needed to know about the whaling industry, the whale anatomy, cetology ("the science of whales") and, of course, the extracting of whale spermaceti (not spermatozoa, though the hand squeezing might leave some wondering...)! What's not to love? ( )

Una obra cabdal de la literatura del segle XIX d'aventures. Moby Dick narra les peripècies del balener Pequod al capdavant del qual s'hi troba el vell capità Ahab. En la seva obsessiva persecució del catxalot blanc (Moby Dick) portarà a la seva tripulació fins a límits vitals, en una travessa intensa que contextualitza formidablement la dura vida dels baleners en aquesta època. ( )

Like Ahab himself, this novel is not as fearsome as I had imagined. Its downside is easy to spot - dense language strange to the modern ear and a laggard's pace. It tested my patience somewhere abouts page 500, so it did. On the other hand, never have I wanted to highlight so many passages in a novel; the highlights section on my ebook edition is impressively long. It's a mental feast. And then Ishmael is a jovial, intelligent and likable companion carrying us through. Sure you wish he would shut up already about the minute details of harpoon line and whatnot sometimes and get on with his story, but you have to give him his allowances.

As for the central character of Ahab, what a rich and incredibly useful symbol he is. Most remarkable to me, at the moment, is that he is not the tyrannical autocrat ruling his domain by fear as I had previously believed. He rather bent men to his desire through charisma and force of will channeled through a position of authority, so that the majority of those under him believed in his mission themselves, as unwise as it might logically appear. He is obsessed, and dangerous, but sympathetic! Those few who resisted and remained unmoved, and felt moral objections to the enterprise, such as the first mate Starbuck, were ineffectual and limp in opposition.

How very American. Ahab is not Saddam Hussein, he is George W. Bush! Or insert your favorite murderous tyrant/wrongheaded American President contrast here... ( )

So.

Wow.

This is just a fantastic novel. And it fails so badly.

As I made my way through this, I began to get the drift of the novel when it took 23 chapters for Ishmael and Queequeg to even get out to sea. Then it was four chapters of info dump. I don't even think there was a mention of a white whale until the 32 chapter? And then, more info dumps.

I tried to get a handle on this novel and this is the best I can come up with...imagine the voice of Rod Serling as he says,

Imagine, if you will, a timeless place, where the strange and impossible can happen.

A place where Frank Herbert, still heady with the excitement of having finished his novel DUNE, looks to write a similar, yet opposite novel, a bigger, better version of both THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA and JAWS. He finds himself swapping sand for saltwater, sandworms for whales, Stilgar for Queequeg, and Baron Harkonnen for Captain Ahab.

When he finishes it, he hands it off to HOUSE OF LEAVES author Mark Z. Danielewski to add some completely unnecessary interjections that have nothing to do with the plot, as he knows Mark is very good at this.

Mark, then wishing to add some verisimilitude to the burgeoning novel, then hands it off to a writer for the Enclyclopidia Brittanica to add facts on whales, the whaling industry, the significance of "white", facts about rope, more facts about whales, and any other minutiae that may have been mentioned in the dwindling story.

Finally, once that's completed and the novel is now about 40% story, 40% facts, and 20% author's opinions, then Cormac McCarthy is brought in (under strict instructions to leave the damn apostrophes and quotation marks alone) to wordsmith the hell out of the entire thing with the aim of making it prettier, but far more dense.

They'll all agree to slap the name "Herman Melville" on as the author, dust their hands off, and congratulate each other on a job well done.

No one will ever accuse Stephen King of writing too much ever again.

Reader, you've just entered the White Whale Zone.

Okay, so maybe that's a little bit of a crazy scenario, but it's as close as I can come.

At its heart, the main storyline is a good one, and it's actually very gorgeously written. There's a part of me that wants to read the basic, 200-ish page story of Ahab stalking his white whale, without all the side stories, opinion pieces, and informative asides.

Still, the writing... Even the completely unnecessary side trips to get far too much information on some of the crew, eating whale steak, and the difference in crow's nests do come across as interesting, again because the writing is good.

But the points where Melville kills all wind and lets the sails hang limply, his plot dead in the water as he hammers the reader mercilessly with the cetology of various species of whale, etc...they were, while informative in the extreme, were as interesting for the most part as being offered a hearty mug of sea water to drink.

Overall, the combined effect of all of these various passages do serve to make the reader feel each day of the Pequod's long three-year journey, so the novel does sell the journey.

And Ahab? I have to say he's as unlikable a character as I've ever met in fiction.

Overall, while I'd never dive into this novel again, I must say, I'm glad I experienced it. I'm glad I got to revel in Melville's gorgeous prose, and I'm glad I met Ishmael and Queequeg and Starbuck and, yes, even Moby Dick himself. I am richer for having read this novel.

And for that reason, while it's deeply flawed, I have to give this book four solid stars. ( )

We had some giggles over this one. There's great humor in the first several chapters. It's a bit of a drone with the listing of whale types and such. ( )

I have listened to this book as an audiobook over and over again, and I can say that I am much prefer everything that happens to the narrator before he gets on the ship. The long chapters on whaling are really boring and offputting and most people just skip that. This book would’ve been a lot more successful with more drama less how to whale. For one thing it’s much too large to be carried around and I’m sure this was a problem back before digital books when it would cost more to publish so many Unwanted pages. ( )

One of the greatest meditations on the meaning of life and a tale of the sea unparalleled. ( )

MOBY DICK IS THE SPARK OF DIVINE GNOSIS: blubber as those densified sheaths of matter that surround the warm interior, husks of the unseen being. If such an epic sprawling novel is said to contain within it a biblically allegorical mythos; it would only be of the true esoteric route to note that every biblical allegory has its selfsame gnostic roots, hermeneutically bubbling up from such aquatic and critical depths. The descents into cetological minutiae is that same descent of the soul into matter — as Ishmael wrestles with the duality of “docile, verdant peace of the land” and the “crazy cannibalistic chaos of the sea”; he draws his analytical rationality towards that ocean he can only know from a ship; so too Science draws its Pequodic boundary to stave off the abyssal waters of Nun, mystic night of the soul. The artifacts of the mundane realm, which Melville turns into an art of Digression (loci of contemplation), are only existent in contrast with the mysticism of the transcendent ocean, which is one with the Sky - as the archaic consciousness of Queequeg’s when he reveals his cosmology: "the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens". Though critical readings of the ‘homoerotic’ are not correct, on the surface, since the homoerotic is revealed not as within sexuality, but outside of it, when Ishmael is purifying that divine Semen of the Whale that represents gnosis: he goes into an ecstatic trance; a frenzy in which all of mankind, not homoerotic but Homo-Eros, becomes unified — “let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness”. As for Ahab; testament to the old figure and a figure of the Old Testament, has been ‘dismembered’ — much like Osiris, where the loss of his ‘members’ is the forgetting of the Self, only to be ‘remembered’ in anamnesis of the soul. Mystical is his every word that isn't bound to the locale of the ship: Ishmael says “the body is the lees of my better being”, “my shadow here on earth is my true substance”, Ahab says “the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy”, he gnostically laments the scandal of autogenesis: the ontological loneliness of God who so longs to know himself in the void of himself.

Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief.

The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

( )

What is there left to say about Moby Dick? Little wonder that it is regarded as a classic and the subject of endless academic research and analysis. ( )

What a strange book! It was not what I expected, and I thought I knew what to expect. There was a lot of cracking good language and weird ass flights of fancy that I loved (and a good bit of proto-pomo stuff, also fantastic), but to my surprise Ahab kind of left me cold as a character. Perhaps he couldn't live up to the image of him in popular culture?
https://donut-donut.dreamwidth.org/868470.html ( )

“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.”

Okay, so i was just expecting this book to be about a guy that is obsessed with a whale and how he tries to find it. What I actually found was that this book was more about the human condition, whiteness, power, and the things we throw away when we dig our heels in the ground and remain unmoved in our ways. ( )

This book has been on my to do list for many years. Bought a kindle last month, and downloaded it very shortly afterward. I was afraid of this books length, but a friend reminded me that it's really a page turner. And so it is. The language is warmly encompassing instead of off putting, and I find that Ishmael's narrative has a rolling rhythm that I find to be extremely comfortable.

Unexpectedly hilarious and moving, Moby-Dick is worth reading despite the occasional, exhaustive and exhausting chapters about whaling rope or blubber rendering. ( )

There’s a reason why this is a classic. This is a must-read book. ( )

This was not a book that I'd considered reading except when it was recommended to me by two very different members of my extended community of friends. It took a concerted effort on my part to keep going with this novel; it took me about eight months to finish this book. Although I eventually found the style to be accessible, at least in the context of 19th century writers (for instance, I once attempted to read "Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches", an author whose writing style I found to be more complex than that of his friend Melville's -- but I never finished it; the entire experience was just too dense, too baroque for me to complete). At around page 455 of "Moby Dick", I chose to put it down to read Dan Brown's "Inferno", a mere cartoon of a novel by comparison, that took me about one week to finish.

On the one hand -- "Moby Dick" is man's man type of book; it's all about teamwork and hierarchy; female characters appear only as cameos in the early part of the novel -- in the context of preparations for the voyage. The nautical aspect of the book was difficult for me to grasp; it was a foreign language to me. The subject matter also deals with the grossness of life; for example the visceral descriptions of the innards of the slaughtered whales. On the other hand, this work contains poetic and metaphoric richness as well. Because the subtext, especially via the character studies / analyses, does speak to the broader notion of human experience ..... Through Ahab's actions, we learn that the greater the risk, the greater the chances for failure; conversely, "No Guts -- No Glory". Ultimately, the quest is ill-advised; Ahab does as he wants; he's willing to defy Nature; it's a fight to the death. His pursuit is the only thing that makes him feel alive. He succumbs to his death wish; he's gripped by his obsession; there's no turning back. And he convinces his crew to follow him to the bitter end ..... Towards the end of this novel, and especially once I'd finished the book, I realized that it was thought provoking; I reflected upon this work for days afterward,

And there's no question that it's well-written; as the footnotes indicate, Melville was obviously a learned man. But I probably won't ever read "Moby Dick" again. What gave me the most difficulty in this novel was the intermittent descriptions of the various types of whales -- which for me interrupted the momentum of the story line. That being said -- I do see how Melville's encyclopedic research was ultimately necessary to bring cohesion to the project as a whole; Melville sought to immerse the reader within a world. Thus "Moby Dick" is the experience of a world, as much as it is of a story. A world that I'm much more comfortable viewing from a distance. ( )

Nobody told me this was hilarious! I listened to an audiobook, which helped, but if you think about Ishmael as only 95% serious at the most desperate of times, and 25% the rest, this is an extremely funny book, even (especially) the stuff about whales. The list of whales, in fact, made me think of Borges, and I discovered that Borges called it “the infinite novel.” ( )

i liked the part where the whales gave glory to god ⛲️ ( )

This review is for the Frank Muller narration - my review of Melville's book is given for the Kindle book. I found Muller's narration to be excellent and for certain sections of the book, I would probably have given up if I had been reading instead of listening! ( )

An absolute masterpiece. There are far too many themes (Man v Nature, Ahab v Starbuck, Ahab and Pip, The 9 Gams, The Unknowable, Melville v Shakespeare, etc etc etc) to be properly encompassed in a single, brief Goodreads review.

Instead, my experience in reading it: The first third drove me along, and I thought I had found my new favorite book. The humor, the language, the setting, the story were all such that I could not put it down, could not stop thinking about it in off moments. The second third, however, is where it gets its reputation for being a difficult book. For every chapter that advances the plot, there are two that anchor it down in academic asides about whales and the whaling industry. But once one clears these windless waters, the final third sails along to its inevitable conclusion, and I again could not put it down.

This book has earned a spot on my permanent shelf. I may never read it from cover-to-cover again, but I will definitely pick it up now and again to re-read favorite passages, and will be reading about it for the rest of my life. ( )

Definitely the worst book I have ever read. A scattered mess. I really do not know why I sat through the entire book cause I found it incredibly boring nearly the entire time. Really nothing to compliment about this book, and honestly, it may be the worst media-related thing I have ever experienced of all time. Either this, or the arthouse film "Upstream Color"... yeah, so it was really bad. The only good thing is if I talk to people who have heard of the book and say "oh yea I definitely wanna read it someday", I can advice them to not do so. I am basically saving them 400 pages of random whale facts and 400 pages of the most sluggish story to ever be told. If you are reading this review, save yourself the time and don't read Moby-Dick. People who say it is good are pseudo-intellectuals ( )

A Long Tale

Moby Dick is a classic tragedy delivered with excellent story-telling when it comes to the story itself. But the book is encumbered with many chapters of trivia about whales and whaling and other odds and ends pertaining to them; it put great lulls in the flow of the actual adventure. I read it all out of sheer perseverance, but I would recommend to any other interested reader an abridged version. ( )

I loved Moby Dick! I hated Moby Dick!

I read Moby Dick for my own personal enjoyment. I know this is a work I would have gotten more out of if I'd read it as part of a group. But I read through it for myself and my review reflects those views.

First things first: Herman Melville's writing was often beautiful. I will read more of his work.

The book starts off strong and finishes strong, with a breathless three day duel with the dreaded Moby Dick. In between there are countless memorable scenes and moments. Nailing up the dubloon. Ahab's moment of self-doubt/sanity. Even some of the detailed whaling chapters that everyone seems to hate are super interesting.

The problem I had was all the endless, metaphysical rambling. We get an entire chapter on the importance of Moby Dick being white when it feels like a couple of paragraphs would suffice.

I understand, I was reading this the same way I would read any other adventure novel and that isn't what Melville wanted. Without the endless metaphysical noodling, Moby Dick likely wouldn't be held in the regard it is now. But man oh man, it took me just over a month to get through this not terribly long book.

And even when I was sick to death of the philosophical, there was so much good stuff. Ishmael and Quequeeg's friendship. The clash between Ahab and Starbuck and even those whaling scenes, showing the crew extract the oil. All good stuff.

It was a tough read, but I'm glad I read it. Complaints aside, I already miss the book. ( )

I highly recommend this Geat American Novel. ( )

I read this because it is a classic, even though I couldn't understand why someone would want to voluntarily sign on to the hard life of work on a whaling ship. I could understand what characters were doing, but seldom could see why they did what they did. The chapter on whales was skippable, since outdated. I did enjoy, afterward, reading reviews and analysis of this famous novel. ( )

‘I baptise thee not in the name of the Father, but in the name of the Devil’

I am uncharacteristically at a loss on how I feel about this book. It’s such a strange creature - a mongrel of King James’ Bible and the works of Shakespeare as people have quite rightly summated. The sole focus on whaling, much like Hemingway with bullfighting (although it must be said that Hemingway is far inferior to Melville), does of course border on the nauseating. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt. But the humanistic edge, the absolutely spectacular prose, the sheer ease at which Melville utilises mythology and religion, all point to a masterpiece. I’m gonna love this book in a decade or so; but I’m glad to be done with it at the moment. ( )