What a book. I tried to read this once as a child, once as a teen, and now as an adult I’ve finally vanquished my white whale. But still only on audiobook. It’s a slog to get through, but now that I’ve finished it I feel very fond of it. Melville just wanted to list everything white he could think of and how he felt about it, go on a rant about how everyone else is wrong about whales and only his opinion (that they’re fish) matters, and convince people that whalers are actually the most noble sailors and Americans are the best at it. And honestly king. I can’t label this with stars because I wish I could give it 5 and 1 at the same time. My new white whale is still this book, but in print instead of audio.

“…to the last gasp of my earthquake life…”

Try the audiobook if you are struggling to get through this one. It is well worth persevering.

I was astounded how tender and thoughtful these hardened whalers are. Ishmael is the infectious heart of this of course; the whole book is him cradling the Pequod and her sailors and their leviathan prey and the whaling industry and sometimes the entire ocean in his hands and holding it out to show us like a toddler that found a cool bug. He is so deeply in love with everything he talks about that you can't help but fall for them too. Even the many long passages of tangential ruminations on the colour white or objects made from whale parts or the wind become endearing rather than frustrating (though it didn't harm my experience to glaze over for some of them).

The ramshackle crew are almost as charming. As many times as the carpenter complains or Stubbs insists on some ridiculous superstition or Captain Ahab snatches 'doomed by the narrative' from the jaws of 'getting over it', they are always colourful in character and, especially, in phrasing. The Nantucket whaling dialect is a form of poetry. It was also a relief to find out that the many characters of colour have as many (perhaps more) heroic moments and insights and jokes, and even flaws, though Melville does withhold from them the internal depth he languishes upon Captain Ahab and Starbuck and Ishmael. We come closest with Queequeg, with whom the narrative is quite smitten, during his coffin episode, but not even he truly gets his own POV like so many of the white sailors.

The head-hopping in general is far out of line with modern standards of good writing. I didn't mind it on the whole, though I did miss Ishmael and Queequeg, who drift farther out of the book's focus the longer it goes. It suits the rambling, all-encompassing nature of the piece. This book contains adventure, sure, but calling it an adventure novel would be a stretch. The pace rises and falls like conditions at sea and you have to have to ride out both the storms and the doldrums. Its structure is more jumping between islands of an archipelago than a cross-country quest, with lectures on the boat rides between. The encounters I found most fascinating personally were when the Pequod encroached on a pod that included calves and when they met the English captain who lost an arm to Moby-Dick.

Spiritually speaking, I have never read anything so complete on any topic as Moby-Dick struck me as being complete on the nature of whales and whaling as seen through a Western lens. I struggle to think of any aspect of them not touched upon - their migration, breeding, products made from them, mythological presence, physical presence, their sweetness, the danger they present, their intimacy with ocean depths and the spectacle of their spouts. Almost as much can be said of the men who hunted them. If you've ever looked up at a titanic plastic whale in a museum and felt a glimpse of something existential, Moby-Dick will dangle you all the way over that edge. 

i love ishmael. girl what do you MEAN a whales blubber is its skin what’s wrong with you. and he’s even gay

The prose was beautiful, it was funnier than I thought, and it was a truly awesome book, but it was a bit of a slog in the long middle section of the book when Melville spent many a word describing every possible thing to do with whaling at the time.

Herman Melville sure liked to write. He also wants you to know that he read the Bible and all of the philosophers (all of them!) and he understood what they meant to say. A book written by a man, and you can feel it. So graphic about killing and gutting these whales, between getting tangled in all the philosophy crammed into it and being blatantly racist. When there's plot happening it's actually fast paced and interesting, but the other 250 pages draaaaaaaagged on forever. And did he already mention he read philosophy books? This made me understand why people don't like reading classics. If this discouraged you, please give one of the Brontës or Austen a go. 

So much funnier than I expected. So many wonderful sentences, and so many shifting moods and modes where he was either just fucking around w writing styles or really indulging his obsession w whales and whaling. It took me a long time to get bogged down because I loved the informative whale content, too, but did eventually find myself yelling at Melville to get on with it. And then he did in an extremely satisfying way.