The author has put some nice ideas in the book, but he buried them under a pile of descriptive text, which did not have to be there in such quantities. The only positive thing was the great quality and elaboration of the audiobook I was listening to. I had to put that physical book away and it was unreadable. I finished a book, thanks of that audiobook. Overall, the book did not read me well and was sometimes lifeless and tedious to me.

i can't believe the novel started with the "there is only one bed" trope and ended with ahab trying to attack and dethrone God

In some circles this has been referred to as the greatest of American novels. I wanted to know the basis for this, because surely there must be some merit if it is still brought up today. What did I find? I found that Moby Dick is, in a way, two separate books. First, there is a book of whale anatomy. Our narrator Ishmael, being a member of the crew, has many things to say about the process and subject of the whaling industry. Dozens of chapters will go by that are more educational than narrative, and that is why the book is so vilified: This educational content is like 80% of the book. Or at least it feels that way. The second part of this book is the story of our ship, the Pequod, and Captain Ahab’s relentless search for the malicious white whale. And this, surprisingly, was everything it was said to be. The sea is described like the primordial all-encompassing force that it is, and Melville through Ishmael taps into the innate fear of such an alien place, making this book scarier than many books in the horror genre. And within this void is Moby Dick himself, who comes and goes like a cosmic horror of the great deep, presaged by strange omens and otherworldly harbingers. So I recommend the narrative portion of the book, despite it being the minority of the page count. So why might this be called the greatest American novel? There are two possibilities. One, it is, but this is unlikely. Or two, this book was written in the mid-1850s, and there were like two books back then, so it was either this or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and this one is pretty cool. 8/10.

This book can be challenging but, boy, is it worth it. I recommend listening to an audiobook to help you get through. (Librivox has a great free recording done by Stewart Wills.) The style is very experimental and not a straight-forward adventure story. But even though it is dense, there is a lot of humor, wit, reflections on humanity, and lovable characters within. Herman Melville raises great philosophical questions about man, nature, and God. There is a reason this is considered the great American novel.

The sole survivor of a shipwreck immortalizes its ill-fated final voyage: its crew, its prey and its captain’s monomaniacal obsession with the titular white whale. Verbose and glorious, and if Melville is not quite the American Shakespeare he is something deeper altogether.