I did not like this book.  Overall the story is a good story with a moral of not allowing vengeance to influence your decisions.  There are only one or two likable characters.  To be honest the only character with a reasonable amount of development is the cannibal Queequeg and he is not even a main character.  You do begin to see bits and pieces of what drives Captain Ahab near the end, but not nearly enough to understand why he is so determined to kill Moby Dick.  The so called main character/narrator, Ishmael, has very little personality at all.  I guess I just had a hard time relating to the motivations of any of the characters. 
Content and story-wise, the book starts out okay and you get prepped for an exciting journey on a whaling ship...but that is pretty much where an excitement stops until the last 100 pages of the book.  Everything in between was dull shop talk and unnecessary history.  (I mean, there were three chapters about art involving whales. Why?)  It was interesting, but did not contribute to the story that much.  I truly feel you could take the 1st 100-200 pages and the last 100 pages and skip everything else in between and get the same thing out the story.   That being said, if you are into the history and symbolism of whales, and the process of Whaling, this book has a lot of it and you might enjoy this more than I did.

Jfc. This book took me a year and one month to read (possibly due to my poor attention span and the onslaught of whale/maritime data that I have to make sense of) I ended up finishing the book instead of abandoning it out of pure spite. 

The first part (around ⅓) is interesting and Melville's humor is hilarious. The second part is dry and the plot moves slower than before, it's just pure whale facts– Melville basically bludgeons you into submission with an encyclopedia. The latter part of the book (thankfully), the action picks back up. 

Also, the prose can sometimes cause a headache or two so you may need to list down (and search) some of the maritime terms used to avoid future confusions.

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.

Moby-Dick is one of my favorites I've read this year. It is top-tier classic literature. If you have not read it yet, let me just say that they ship it to you badly. Moby-dick is about the whale, yes. But Moby-Dick is really about one man and his descent into total and utter madness. Featuring so much of what I personally love from classics, the main character, Ishmael, loves to give you all his knowledge of boating, whaling, and everything in-between in the most pretentious way possible. Moby-Dick is wonderous, fascinating, horrifying at times, and a ride the entire way through. I absolutely loved it and could not put it down.