Moby Dick; or, The Whale

published	1983 by University of California Press
first published	1851
binding	Paperback
isbn	0520045483 (isbn13: 9780520045484)
ebook
pages	600
description	This trade edition of Moby-Dick is a reduced version of the Arion Press Moby-Dick, which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 2...more [close] This trade edition of Moby-Dick is a reduced version of the Arion Press Moby-Dick, which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan." The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of Moby-Dick used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. This reduced version is smaller in size than the Arion edition and the California deluxe edition, but it includes all of the original pages and illustrations. It is printed in black only throughout, and it is not slipcased. [close]
date added	03-24-07 edit book

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J rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

05/16/08

I have often said that if trapped on a desert island, I’d want Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki as the one book with me (rim shot). Being serious, I’ve later decided that since Catch-22 suits my mood any time I pick it up, that would be my real choice. Yet every time I read Herman Melville’s towering Moby Dick, I firmly believe that no other book should suffice.

It’s one of those books you always mean to read. “Oh yes, I’ve got Moby Dick on my list and Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses a...more

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Alison rated it:

(review of isbn 0142437247)

07/03/08

Read in July, 2008

Avast! Here be spoilers!
I loved this book. But I don’t really want to talk about my feelings; I want to talk about how Melville wrote a truly radical book, a book that turns the world upside-down, one of the Best. Books. Ever.
Moby Dick begins as the story of a fastidious Yankee schoolmaster who signs onto a whaling voyage but finds himself in the realm of topsy-turvy. At first he is terrified and disgusted by his boarding house's filth and by his bedmate, Queequeg, a South Paci...more Avast! Here be spoilers!
I loved this book. But I don’t really want to talk about my feelings; I want to talk about how Melville wrote a truly radical book, a book that turns the world upside-down, one of the Best. Books. Ever.
Moby Dick begins as the story of a fastidious Yankee schoolmaster who signs onto a whaling voyage but finds himself in the realm of topsy-turvy. At first he is terrified and disgusted by his boarding house's filth and by his bedmate, Queequeg, a South Pacific cannibal, idolater, and tattooed guy. But Queequeg's affection, integrity, and bravery destroy many of our whaler’s prejudices about race, nation, religion, and relationships between men: "Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair." He even consents to worship Queequeg's little carved idol Yojo: after all, if his own Presbyterianism demands that he do unto others blah blah blah, and if he would have Queequeg join his own faith, "Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator." So far this is all charming, funny, and slyly subversive. But Melville's project seeks to upset even more fundamental prejudices about humans, nature, and God: that these categories exist in hierarchy, that they are not interchangeable, and that they possess any discrete characteristics at all.
Our narrator tells us that whales are more or less fish, and that they are often deadly to their human hunters. This combination of baseness, bestiality, violence, and superiority in the whale unsettles the assumption of human ascendancy in the food chain, evolution, and/or God’s Creation. This is unsettling stuff; in a typically 19thC (and 20th) way, there follow dozens of approaches to understanding –and delimiting--the whale: biological, historical, fabular, anecdotal, commercial, religious, etymological, archaeological, all intended to quell uncertainty and establish a chain of command: man on top, fish bottom (even rejecting the possibility that such a brute of an animal could be a mammal). But Captain Ahab’s mission—to exact revenge on the whale who bit off his leg—upsets all of these rational claims.
“’Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’” A man who regards a fish as his antagonist also acknowledges a kind of equality with that fish: either the man becomes less a man, or acknowledges the fish as more than animal. Ahab does indeed blaspheme; in claiming Moby Dick as his enemy, his tormentor, his ambition, and his end, he rejects both the divine mandate in Genesis for men to dominate animals, and the supposed resemblance between God and man. His obsession puts his ship and sailors in the deepest danger: not of being killed, but of ceding their special relationship with God, i.e., their in/difference to animals, their humanity. And the sailors give it up, willingly, in stupendous cult scenes sealed with blood! If a man can give up the attributes that heretofore defined him as a man, choosing to seek equality with the non-white, the non-Christian….then why not seek equality with a fish? If this is madness, it is the madness of the utter destabilization of authority and identity: Ahab, devilry, Moby Dick, animality, humanity, and godlike aspirations—all are mixed.
In some of the strangest and most wonderful passages, Melville uses form to demonstrate the disintegration of the crew’s humanity: the intense characterization vanishes, to be replaced by theatrical choruses, incursions from one point of view into another, the occasional struggling return to a kind of documentary objectiveness, which gives way to further dissolution of reason (see our narrator’s impassioned rant on what Moby Dick means, personally, to him: whiteness itself, the very element of divinity and horror, according to him). As a character, our narrator virtually disappears: his confident first-person gives way, even his name ceases to be mentioned. Other characters persist, but increasingly do so only in worshipful apprehension of the whale—some numbly, some eagerly, but all of them looking forward to the whale’s coming as the denouement of their endeavor. Form unravels; human aspiration to godliness unravels; and our narrator, who has accepted a great many paradoxes and uncertainties, must finally suffer the consequences of his acceptance.
If Ahab is a portrait of a madman struggling between his bestiality and his sublimity, then what of the whale? The reader who has been tracking these disruptions will be waiting for Melville to recognize the whale’s rights as an individual being, to explore the moral implications of his uncanny anatomical , behavioral, and emotional likeness to men, and to feel compassion for his plight (our narrator’s increasing use of the epithet “poor whale” is telling); that is, we expect to see the whale humanized. But in the last pages of the novel, Melville accomplishes a wondrous feat: we see the whale not as humanlike, and certainly not as a mere symbol of any of these embattled traits, but as a whale qua whale, which is an animal, which is divine.
“A gentle joyousness - a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.” And, “warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.”
The most confounding moment of all, when everything we understand of this world comes to its fulfillment, is when we see that Moby Dick is beautiful, that he is a happy whale who delights in his whalishness, that he has sea-fowl groupies who love him. He is the most powerful, lovely, destructive, peaceful, astonishing thing in the world. He has an existence of his own, self-sufficient, without regard for human intention, and inscrutable to human regard. He is a mystery who refuses to be understood by science or history. These are the attributes of God, and Moby Dick is a fish. To aspire to godliness is to aspire to fishiness. The human-God equation has been shattered.
In this world, what room is there for humans? Well. Ahab gets real mad at all this; he and Moby Dick tussle it out to the end. The Pequod sinks, taking down all the sailors; Tashtego, who’s climbed to the top of the mainmast, is last seen as an arm reaching over the waves: “at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.”
Only one man witnesses this last snub at heaven; one man survives utter dissolution, and he asks us to call him Ishmael.
...less

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Justin rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

06/10/07

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: Whale Lovers/Whale Haters

I really didn't know what to expect from this book other than what comes down the pike (i.e. crazy man with one leg captains a whaling ship and wants to seek revenge on the whale that bit his leg off). For one, I'll just say that this book is much more a celebration of whales--or, more specifically, the sperm whale--than it is a book about killing whales. I mean, don't get me wrong: If the whole idea of catching and slicing up whales make you squeamish, you will probably be horrified by more tha...more I really didn't know what to expect from this book other than what comes down the pike (i.e. crazy man with one leg captains a whaling ship and wants to seek revenge on the whale that bit his leg off). For one, I'll just say that this book is much more a celebration of whales--or, more specifically, the sperm whale--than it is a book about killing whales. I mean, don't get me wrong: If the whole idea of catching and slicing up whales make you squeamish, you will probably be horrified by more than a few passages in the book, not to mention the fact that the sole purpose of the voyage being undertaken in the book is to do exactly that (kill whales). But if you put yourself back in the time when the book was written and try to not judge too harshly by today's killing-whales-is-really-really-bad (which I agree with) standards, then, yeah, you'll see Melville really set out to put whaling and, by extension, the sperm whale, on the map. Pages and pages are dedicated to an exhaustible understanding of the whale itself.

The other thing I wasn't expecting in this book was the overwrought prose. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me, considering when the book was written, but, to some extent, it did. Not that it was always a bad thing. When I had time to really sit down with this book, I rather enjoyed a lot of the more poetic passages. Here's an example of Ishmael describing Moby Dick (the whale) for the first time:

On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away--on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all for who the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.

This paragraph perfectly captures the peacefullness and destructive force that Moby Dick, and the sea itself at large, represent. Hemingway wrote a story about an old man and a fish, but he could (nor would) never do justice to all the poetic majesty of the sea and seafaring life.

However, what Hemingway could do was sublimely represent the masculine and stoic grace of the sort of characters who did lead seafaring lives. And I guess that's where the contrast lies (and where I'm also sort of torn about who writes a better seafaring story in the Melville-vs.-Hemingway title fight I just made up): more than once I thought about how, due to the prose, Ishmael comes off sounding more like a prancing, lisping, effete, Little Lord Fauntleroy describing (and ascribing) the most fanciful things to what were probably very stoic and burly men in the most flowery prose. On the one hand, if you can get over that, then, yes, the prose often is quite beautiful and, again, much much better at touching the rightful majesty of the sea. But, yeah, on the other hand, reading Moby Dick, you get the feeling that most of the sailors on any given ship-of-fools at that time probably didn't talk in the way Melville ascribes to them (unless it was an especially well-read ship-of-fools) and, at the very least, that the old, grumpy Ahab didn't speak in parables more fitting to Homer than a whaling ship.

But Melville probably has more in common with Homer than Hemingway as far as what each was trying to accomplish with their respective stories. Both Melville and Homer want to inject a large amount of poetry and eminence into what are essentially professions that require neither poetry nor eminence (whaling and warring, respectively). Hemingway uses understatement to, as I said earlier, do justice to the terse, stoic nature of the men who populate his books.

Also, Melville is funny. Seriously. But not seriously funny. Just funny.
...less

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Colie! rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

04/14/08

Read in April, 2008

recommended to Colie! by: Cara and Elizabeth
recommends it for: Anyone American. Know your lit!

The best part of reading Moby Dick is looking for unintentional innuendo. The title begs for it. So far, I believe this is my favorite chestnut: “At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.”
I've had similar experiences myself.

Right on. Now that I've finished the book, I ...more The best part of reading Moby Dick is looking for unintentional innuendo. The title begs for it. So far, I believe this is my favorite chestnut: “At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.”
I've had similar experiences myself.

Right on. Now that I've finished the book, I can speak further than my sophomoric joy of homoerotic quote hunting, for which this book has fertile grounds. It took me a while to finish, but I blame Los Angeles. I don't have the luxury of subway rides to peruse. And it's all sunny, all you want to do is be outside and do yoga. Anyway. I started and stopped MD a few times in my youth (you know, like age 13 youth) and when I picked it up again, I couldn't believe how FAST it read. Then of course it got slow in the middle... Ishmael likes to ruminate over measurements of whale bones, physical traits of Sperm v. Right Whale, Whales in art and history, which I guess is all well and good, but once that's done with and we return to the story of Stubb and Starbuck and Tashtego, Queequeg, and OF COURSE that crazy hot old man Ahab, it's a reading feeding frenzy. I'd have to say those pages read about 20 times faster, minimum. Which made me super sad that they were, in my opinion, so scare. (Scarce in a 1,000 pager.) And I was in complete disbelief when I actually completed my read: these pages zip by, and in 1.5 pages you're DONE. It's so fast, you don't even trust yourself to believe what you read really happened. I had to skip back and reread. [Avast, here be spoilers:] I thought, "No way I read that right. Is Ahab gone? The whole Pequod? WTF!!!" And then there's this half page epilogue to confirm: yep, that's all, folks. Part of me was really pissed: Ishmael, you couldn't give it JUST a little more time? It kind of felt like a poorly planned essay for the SAT, where the middle is fleshed out really completely but then the student finds he only has one minute to wrap it up. But I think Melville probably wasn't writing under that kind of time constraint. On the other hand, my feelings of loss and abandonment seemed somehow appropriate for the book, like I was left in the big open sea, sans Pequod, on a floating coffin myself. ...less

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Joseph rated it:

(review of isbn 0142437247)

06/01/08

Read in June, 2008

recommends it for: everyone

Incredible. Incomparable. Ineffable.

One of the most challenging and most intense novels to which I have ever put my mind. Over the course of reading this book, I encountered resistance. When I said I was reading it, someone responded, "On purpose?" Just today, finishing it in a cafe, a couple sitting across from me spoke of the book to each other. "Have you read Moby Dick?" asked the girl. "I tried but it didn't do it for me," said the guy. Who are these people....more Incredible. Incomparable. Ineffable.

One of the most challenging and most intense novels to which I have ever put my mind. Over the course of reading this book, I encountered resistance. When I said I was reading it, someone responded, "On purpose?" Just today, finishing it in a cafe, a couple sitting across from me spoke of the book to each other. "Have you read Moby Dick?" asked the girl. "I tried but it didn't do it for me," said the guy. Who are these people.

Maybe I'm a literary snob. I don't think that's such a bad thing. If you don't become ill at the state of modern "popular" fiction, sometimes called literature but resoundingly far from it, you have not given enough time to exploring how things once were; how dedicated writers were to creating an experience; a time when craft reigned. After reading Moby Dick, I'm just dumbstruck as to what passes for literature these days.

But then maybe people don't want to be challenged anymore. Maybe books have become as much a diversion as television. Sure, books are meant to be a diversion; they are meant to be enjoyable and to pass the time in a pleasant way. Otherwise, why read? But Moby Dick is more than that and literature should be more than that. Books should change you and open you up and free you. Modern fiction is little more than reality tv. Why else would the modern reader be so obsessed with both the non-fiction and fiction memoir? We want to escape but not be challenged. We pick up a book like Moby Dick, feel pressured by it to think, and put it right back down.

Moby Dick is the American epic. There is nothing even close to it. If you think you know of a book that can rival it, let me read it and prove you wrong. This is the novel that all other novels should strive to be in spirit. How can these people turn it away?

Go back to your Palahniuks and Lethams and Eggers and everything else masquerading as something important. Don't give Moby Dick a chance, don't open your eyes, and relax deep into your easy-chair of mediocrity. Moby Dick is difficult. Moby Dick is something you won't fully understand when you try to read it in high school, in college, in your formative years, in your later years. It is something that needs multiple readings and needs to be read at a time in your life when you are most susceptible to the truths it entails. It deserves to be read now and forever.

We all have a White Whale we are chasing. The question is whether or not one may ever truly recognize it....less

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Lauren rated it:

(review of isbn 0142437247)

03/07/08

Read in January, 2006

This book currently occupies a hallowed place on my favorite-books-shelf. I've read all of it once, and parts of it thrice. My first copy (which is now one of two in my possession) was increasingly dog-eared the further along I read. The sheer beauty of some of Melville's passages can stop my breath momentarily; while at other times, his comedy makes me laugh out loud -- any book that can make me do either of these is notable, and a book that does both is exceptional.

Ishmael, the narrator...more This book currently occupies a hallowed place on my favorite-books-shelf. I've read all of it once, and parts of it thrice. My first copy (which is now one of two in my possession) was increasingly dog-eared the further along I read. The sheer beauty of some of Melville's passages can stop my breath momentarily; while at other times, his comedy makes me laugh out loud -- any book that can make me do either of these is notable, and a book that does both is exceptional.

Ishmael, the narrator, is a school teacher who takes to the sea "whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off..." I find I have to quote this passage (from the first page) directly, because it is not only brilliantly written but a perfect example of Melville's blend of humor, pathos, and perspective. Plus, it makes me want to reread the entire book every time I see it.

The book is, in my opinion, not primarily a parable of obsession, vengeance, and the limits of humanity thrown into relief by the isolation of the sea -- blah, blah, blah. Its readers are often bored by its encyclopedic passages detailing the intricacies of whaling ships or cetology or the "try-works". However, these passages are very much in the character of our narrator: Ishmael is a school teacher who passionately loves learning and revels in describing as much as possible of the life constituted by "whaling". Perhaps it is because I can share in this love of learning that these passages have never bored me in that way.

Moreover, I think the book is often absolutely hysterical: "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." Or "Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed." And those are just in the first 10 (short!) chapters.

All in all, the book could be divided up, as some have said before, into the story of Ahab, the story of Ishamel, a treatise on whaling, and a tome of short stories of the sea, and any one of them alone would be exceptional. However, their combination yields a work of complex beauty that holds me in awe and harbors a power and singularity I have found in very few other places....less

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Jamie rated it:

(review of isbn 0142437247)

08/03/08

Read in August, 2007

So, Herman Melville's Moby Dick is supposed by many to be the greatest Engligh-language novel ever written, especially among those written in the Romantic tradition. Meh.

It's not that I don't get that there's a TON of complexity, subtlety, and depth to this book about a mad captain's quest for revenge against a great white whale. And on the surface it's even a pretty darn good adventure story. And, honestly, Melville's prose is flowing, elegant, and as beautiful as any writing can possibly b...more So, Herman Melville's Moby Dick is supposed by many to be the greatest Engligh-language novel ever written, especially among those written in the Romantic tradition. Meh.

It's not that I don't get that there's a TON of complexity, subtlety, and depth to this book about a mad captain's quest for revenge against a great white whale. And on the surface it's even a pretty darn good adventure story. And, honestly, Melville's prose is flowing, elegant, and as beautiful as any writing can possibly be. It's magnificent, actually.

It's just that any enjoyment or satisfaction I got out of the book was overshadowed by the tedious, largely pointless stretches of encylopedic descriptions about the whaling industry. Melville strikes me as one of those people who would corner you at a party and talk incessantly about whaling, whaling ships, whales, whale diet, whale etymology, whale zoology, whale blubber, whale delacies, whale migration, whale oil, whale biology, whale ecology, whale meat, whale skinning, and every other possible topic about whales so that you'd finally have to pretend to have to go to the bathroom just to get away from the crazy old man. Only he'd FOLLOW YOU INTO THE BATHROOM and keep talking to you about whales while peering over the side of the stall and trying to make eye contact with you the whole time.

Look, it's not that I don't get it. Or at least some of it. I get, for example, that Ishmael's description of the absurdities of whale classification systems provide a backdrop against which to project the recurring theme of mankind's doomed quest for complete understanding of truths that are ineffable and forever hidden (sometimes literally) under the surface. I get that. I just wish the guy didn't feel like he had to take it to such absurd lengths. I do not need twenty pages about how to properly coil a harpoon line! I can see why most people don't make it through this book without judicious skimming.

Still, I feel like I accomplished something and that I can now nod sagely the next time someone makes an oblique reference to Captain Ahab, mentions the Pequod, or refers to something as "that person's Great White _______." And chances are they skimmed more than I did, anyway....less

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Rob rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

01/29/08

bookshelves: classics

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: Masochists

Moby Dick is probably two or three books that, if separated, could be good - Ahab's whaling story, a book on the anatomy of whales, and the narrator's tale of largely religious self exploration - and it's easy to see how someone could love it.

But I don't - frankly, I find the mix frustrating. With Ahab's story, which was the most interesting part to me, every time it gets a bit of momentum the narrator interrupts with a chapter along the lines of 'More About The Whale's Eye' that completely...more

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Izetta Autumn rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

04/18/08

bookshelves: adoration-of-author, favorites, whosecanonisitanyway

Read in January, 2008

When I first attempted to read this book, I was in a first-year Creative Writing Class. At the time, I was less than enthused about reading yet another white male, after a long run of school assigned reading of only white men. So I was resistant. And perhaps rightly so. After years of not having the opportunity to read international literature and literature by people of color, to my heart's content, I needed a break. An opportunity to explore and revel.

And then I re-read Invisible Man by Ra...more

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Hannah rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

04/01/08

I actually thoroughly enjoyed Moby Dick. Although it was very long, I enjoyed all of the stories inside the novel. I especially liked the prophecy and his foreshadowing doom for the Pequod. Ishmael was an interesting character and an awesome narrator. Melville has an astounding writing style and used it phenomenally in the novel. His words flowed very nicely together making it easy to read. I liked the assortment of characters on the ship, because they kept it interesting. The fact that they le...more

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B. Zedan rated it:

(review of isbn 0142437247)

06/20/08

bookshelves: gutenberg-downloads

Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: Folks who don't mind hundreds of pages categorising whales via a unique system based on book sizes

Long one, from right after I first read it:
Um? By the time I got into higher school, I wasn't like, literary (I was obsessed with Dune, and Richard Brautigan, okay?), and in college the extent of how much I cared for non SF canon and sub-canon pretty much began and ended with personal interpretations of Shakespeare and believing that Sonnet 18 was a eulogy. In other words, less than nought. So, other than the basic ideas needed to remain culturally literate and a fondness for the name &...more

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Rebecca rated it:

(review of isbn 0142437247)

06/17/08

Read in May, 2008

Um. This is the weirdest, most outrageous book I've ever read. Using words like "classic" and "epic" and "desert-island-book" is just way too banal for this enormous, bizarre, utterly insane novel. I was in turn amused, bored, outraged, irritated, and charmed, but mostly blood-thirsty for the business of KILLING WHALES to begin.

Ishmael, in the first paragraph, says, "I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." Are...more

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Ian rated it:

(review of isbn 0553213113)

07/12/08

Read in July, 2008

Everyone knows the story of this book, which is fine enough, but what really stuck with me were the small, sophisticated touches Melville makes. I was expecting more of a straight-ahead seafaring yarn with philosophical and allegorical overtones, but no. First of all, the characterization of the narrator was stunning. We spend a lot of time with him in the opening chapters, before he boards the ship, but he remains largely a cipher. We pick up a few tantalizing hints about his personality, mostl...more

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Erik rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

06/18/08

I first read this when I was nineteen; I did not enjoy reading it nearly so much as I enjoyed having read it. Every summer, a friend's daughter comes home from college, and together we read books she's interested in. This summer, she said she wanted to read MOBY DICK. I was not at all interested, but I'd never say no to a student who wants to read this book.

The past three weeks of reading have been unadulterated joy. The book: I get it, now, I finally get all the fuss. Harold Bloom say...more

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W rated it:

02/23/08

"Call me Ishmael"--God will listen. Strange name for a pretty godless rant, which is really one of the top four books in America. The bible story has Abraham chasing Hagar and their son, Ishmael, out of camp in favor of Sarah and Isaac (one of the two saddest stories in the the bible), so the questionable confidence in a Christian god is always challenged.

Speaking of Moby Dick, I am reminded of Maxwell Perkins habit of giving his best writers: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, copies ...more

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Scroutch rated it:

(review of isbn 0143058096)

03/17/08

Read in November, 2007

recommended to Scroutch by: God, Shakespeare, and Milton
recommends it for: people who read

Moby Dick is in one of my Top 10 books of all time. Maybe that doesn't mean a lot to you who do not know of my impeccable taste, but that is neither here nor there. Anyone who isn't a total asshole would recognize that Melville is a bad-ass and that Moby Dick is masterpiece.

First of all, let me just say that I love the word "monomaniacal." Second of all, allow me to confess that I would totally make out with Captain Ahab. Whale bone peg legs are fucking hot, and so is being all ch...more