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 kills it, often with an excessively heavy-handed dose of religious perspective. It never quite seems to settle into being story, or philosophy, so much as swinging back and forth between them so that when I've settled into reading one, the other jumps out and throws me for a loop.

Also, while the language is occasionally so beautiful that it's nearly unforgettable, it's also occasionally awful, with dreadful structure that reads badly. It's not just age - I've read older books that read much better than this. Sometimes, I got the impression that Melville just stuck his hand into a big bag of punctuation and threw it at the page, hoping for the best.

In the end, the story underneath is a great one, which probably justifies why the book is such a classic. Ahab's character is intriguing and powerful, the view of the whale is genuinely interesting at times, and even the narrator's self exploration could be intriguing - but as a whole, I find the three work against each other, not together. They don't complement, but instead read as though the writer starts telling you one thing, gets bored with it and suddenly goes off on a tangent for a while - the sort of thing you'd expect from an amateur writer with ADD, not a legendary work of fiction.

So, even though I find many things to recommend it, I can't recommend the book - I found it just too painful an experience to read it. Ultimately, I join many of Melville's contemporary critics in disliking it.