Books

It’s very easy to read considering it’s age

There's a fun podcast called "Moby-dick Energy." It's a nice companion. Don't forget how funny M-D is.

I love the word counterpane thanks to this book!

It's in my top 3 books of all time. Its reputation is all 'blood and thunder' but it's actually very funny, mad and thrilling.

Note that the opening line isn't exactly casual or jovial. The protagonist's name is not Ishmael, he's referencing the Biblical character Ishmael who was the firstborn son of Abraham by his wife's servant Hagar. Later Abram had a son, Isaac by his wife Sarah and Ishmael and his mother Hagar were cast out to make Isaac the only inheritor of Abraham.

After being cast out and wandering the wilderness waiting to die, God saved Ishmael and his mother and "made him a great nation" with 12 sons from an Egyptian wife.

So by opening with "Call me Ishmael" the narrator is giving us a lot of assumptions about himself, that he's been cast aside by his family especially and that he hopes to become great and powerful despite that.

I've always enjoyed Moby Dick and don't get the reputation it has. I've read it at least a couple times and listened to the audio once. I like the narrator and the characters and story. Even the extended stuff about whaling that is always complained about was fairly interesting and well done (at least for me).

I've never had any interest in reading it until this post! I might actually give it go now.

I hope there are good versions of it with footnotes.

It's great. It also gets extra points for being kinda gay.

Well, what else did you expect from possibly the best novel ever written?

I'm in the small camp of people who didn't like it; I didn't find it hard to read, I just found the whole thing boring

I ended up DNF-ing it

You’re being a lot more amused by it than I was. I listened to the audiobook because I would never have been able to get through it otherwise.

The entire, long chapter about the color white may still be coming up for you. I just couldn’t believe a huge irrelevant digression to discuss the color white in the middle of a book that was actually telling a story. That just was not what I was expecting.

Hah! I’ve was just thinking the other day about the concept of ‘Gamming’ and how there is a whole chapter about it.

i love the book the audiobook was amazing well worth the 24 hours and i would totally read it again

People read it wrong. Melville just wants to rant at you and he wants you to have a good time listening. It’s fun as hell.

you probably would have liked his first draft where there was no whale.

Best USA novel. Very good stuff.

I'm 1/2 way through it and had to put it down for a while. I think it loses it's path a lot (on the main story, not the little asides), and it's absurd this weirdo of a book is considered such a valuable and precious classic.

All that is not to say I don't like some parts of it. I think all the time about Melville passionately discussing whether a whale is a fish or a mammal, and ultimately going with fish. I find the whole culture of whaling being described fascinating. This guy really can craft a sentence. And I liked when whales get compared to sizes sheets of paper come in.

I listened to it on audiobook a couple years ago and I found it charming. Plus I know so many whale facts that I'm just dying to bust out.

(the opening line is just "Call me ishamel")

To be fair, that's a pretty heavy line when it's taken in context.
It tells you a fuckload about the protagonist:

1. He isn't seeking notoriety or celebrity.
2. He has effectively nothing to his name, to the point he is comfortable discarding it and starting anew.
3. He feels he was cast out, and likely feels that his own origins up to that point have been a burden.
4. He's got guts, or courage, or verve, or cojones, or whatever you want to call it- even if you are destitute it takes some not insubstantial strength of character to discard your own identity.
5. Ishmael is not his original name.
6. He is at least moderately educated, literate, and familiar with biblical text in some detail.
7. He has decided he or his descendants may still have some grand future ahead of them, he hasn't given up on the idea that he may be destined for some greater purpose or adventure.
8. He's no idiot, The context of Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar, isn't obscure or specialized knowledge, but its application as a sobriquet is subtle and clever.

How difficult would you say it is to read to a non-native English speaker? It's on my shelf, but I havent dared to read it yet because of its reputation of being difficult.

I felt that the 30% of whale tangents/musings slowed me down while reading but it definitely makes the book better. It feels like it says more about Ishmael that he’s so intent on convincing you the reader how meaningful and grandiose it is to be hunting sperm whales, almost with a desperation of someone trying to convince themselves

“…and I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while.”

I love Moby-Dick. Actually failed my high school english class when I didn't read it initially. Then came back around to it 15 years later and found my time with it. Ishmael is a friend now.

I'm also reading this for the first time, and I was also surprised by these things! It's mostly very light-hearted. Ishmael is a huge goofball.

All I got was that Ahab should have tried harder.

Not hard. Just intensely boring.

I tried recently but gave up. It was too slow and I didn’t care for the style.

I haven't finished it, but so far like 30% of the book is irrelevant to the plot and is just the authors random musings and philosophies on life. He dedicates entire pages to debating what the most comfortable room temperature and position to sleep in is, or his opinions on random countries like Japan or "Afghanistan". It almost reads like blogposts or diary entries.

That was precisely what made it totally unreadable to me. As if he were indeed paid for words (which I heard is a classical literature urban legend). At one point, Melville visits a church mass, and he writes down the complete salmon over multiple pages. That was my exit.

It's a shaggy dog tale about the big one that got away. 800-plus pages for a lame punchline.

I had to stop reading when he would not stop describing the pulpit. I just couldn't do it anymore. The endless, needless descriptions were killing me.

I regularly think of the line where Ismael is in a bad mood and wants to flip people’s hats off their head as he walks by

Bad rep?! Wtf planet are you living on?!

We read this in a book group a few years back. Some books are worth the extra effort needed to get through, and this is definitely one of them.

"I stopped eating whale meat cuz of this book" - GoodReads review