It only took me 5 weeks, but I was finally able to get through this book. I genuinely think Moby Dick is a good book, but geez the tedium! I found it extremely difficult to get through, not only because of the encyclopaedia-like chapters on everything cetology, but also because it's written in an archaic style with archaic language and lots of references to Western culture that makes it hard to follow. We don't see much of the narrator, Ishmael once the actual whaling voyage begins, except when he pops in to lecture the reader about whales and other whaling-related topics.  There are several good bits in this book, but most of the time I found myself struggling to understand what was going on in each scene. 

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.