Moby Dick: Or the Whale
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About this ebook
The classic novel. According to Wikipedia: "Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His first two books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers, and his popularity declined precipitously after only a few years. By the time of his death he had been almost completely forgotten, but his longest novel, Moby-Dick — largely considered a failure during his lifetime, and most responsible for Melville's fall from favor with the reading public — was recognized in the 20th century as one of the chief literary masterpieces of both American and world literature."
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and poet. His most notable work, Moby Dick, is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.
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Reviews for Moby Dick
5,537 ratings202 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5very good, very long
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Worst book ever
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quite difficult to read - but enjoyable
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A good story shouldn't take that long to tell.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A perfect novel. Pure genius.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is it, folks--the Great American Novel. It doesn't get any better--or more experimental--than this.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A review of Moby-Dick? Right. It's been around for 150 odd years. It'll be around for at least another 150 odd. For good reason. If Shakespeare wrote Genesis and the Book of Judges, this might be a nice approximation of how Melville writes. And that's how I would describe Moby-Dick.Other notes, pay attention to Ahab's speech patterns and his spiritual journey throughout Moby-Dick; you'd swear he was a maimed Hamlet.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In my view, America's greatest novel. Timeless, poetic and emblematic of a once great industry dominated by Americans.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I don't suggest reading this unless you enjoy torture or just want to say "yah, that's right - I read Moby Dick!" I just do not like this book at all.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Read this out of a sense of duty, while recovering from surgery for a deviated septum, which required laying on my back for a week. I thought it was pretty good.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The most beautiful modern edition of an undisputed masterpiece. Stranger, funnier, and more varied than I imagined, this edition literally stopped people on the street. A homeless man in San Francisco stopped and admired the book, smiling as he told me he "needed that".
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On my should read list list but avoided successfully for 45 years. Between the Philbrick recommendation and the lauds to Hootkins' narration, I finally succumbed and spent nearly a month of commutes taking the big story in, and the next month thinking about the story. SO glad I listened rather than skimmed as a reader. It has everything;. Agree with Floyd 3345 re fiction and nonfiction shelving
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Considered an encyclopedic novel. Never heard of this before but it fits. In this story based on the author's whaling voyage in 1841, Moby Dick, or the white whale, inspired by Mocha Dick and the sinking of the whaleship Essex. The detail is very realistic and in this book you not only learn about whale hunting, you learn about whales and porpoise and ships. Chapters are dedicated to lengthy descriptions. On the ship, the reader is introduced to a cultural mixture of class and social status as well as good and evil and the existence of God. Melville used narrative prose but also songs, poetry, catalogs and other techniques from plays. The story is told through Ishmael. Plot:Ishmael meets up with Queequeg and shares a bed because the inn is overcrowded. Queegueg is a harpooner and they sign unto the Pequod. Characters:Ishmael: Queequeg:Starbuck: first mateStubb: second mateTashtego: Indian from Gay Head (harpooner)Flask: third mate,Daggoo: harpooneer from Africa. Captain Ahab: Fadallah: a harpooneer, Parse. Pip: black cabin boyThe boats: Jeroboam, Samule Enderby, the Rachel, The Delight and Pequod. These ships all have encountered Moby Dick. Ahab is obsessed with revenge against Moby Dick because of the loss of his leg which the whale bit off. There are several gams or meetings of whale boats. Ending with a tireless pursuit of the whale without regard to the dangers it exposes the sailors of Pequod. Starbuck begs Ahab to quit. Structure:narrator shapes the story by using sermons, stage plays, soliloquies and emblematic readings. The narrator is the aged Ishmael. There is also narrative architecture. There are 9 meetings with other boats.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One of my favorites! The opening paragraph pretty much sums up why I read it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Read this in tandem w/ friends, a full spectrum of opinion was thus established. My friend Roger Baylor left an indelible smudge on his own critical reputation for his hapless remarks. I tended to the ecstatic edge of said continuum. I did find the novel's disparate elements an obstacle at times, but, then again, I had to temper my velocity anyway as it was a group read: there's been sufficient snark from my mates for a decade now about plowing through a selection in a weekend. There was such a foam of detail and philosophy. The terrors of thunder and the groan of salty timber abounded. The stale breath of morning would often freeze upon the very page. The majesty of Melville's prose was arresting, it held, bound -- it felt as if one's focus was being nailed to the mast like Ahab's gold. Moby Dick is such a robust tapestry, epic and yet filigreed with minor miracles and misdeeds.
I do look forward to a reread. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5No one ever seems to discuss this, but there are parts of this exquisitely written tome that are hilarious!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I listened to the unabridged text as an audiobook over a couple of months of long drives to and from work, and what struck me most was the structure of this huge book: the story of Ahab is essentially a short story which Melville has fragmented and embedded in thousands of tons of blubber! That is bold. I think it's also interesting that when this long text finally ends we're actually not quite half way through Melville's source--the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820. Within this context, Melville's colossal text is actually a truncated and abbreviated version of his primary source! Again, wild to think of it. Because I love to hear stories even more than to read them, because the rhythms have a physical presence when read aloud, I highly recommend the text as an audiobook. That Melville would devote an entire chapter to "The Blow Hole" is outrageous in many ways, but also an interesting listen. A friend told me her professor advised her class to "not wait for the whale" as they were reading the novel. That's hard advice to take. The book is definitely a unique experience.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Societally we all know the basic story. I learned a great deal about whaling, and the times.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rated: AFascinating tale of the great white whale. Herman Melville develops complete context with enlightening descriptions of the whaling industry from ships to life on board to voyages to whaling to whales to the chase to the capture to the extraction of oils to life and death upon the sea. Oh, yes -- there is the story of Moby Dick.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5(Original Review, 1981-02-10)This is a book that knows how excessive it is being.It took me three times through it to realize that it's the greatest novel in the English language. Of course it has everything wrong with it: the digressions, the ludicrous attempt to out-Shakespeare Shakespeare, the prose through which a high wind blows perpetually, the fact that it's written almost entirely in superlatives . . . Never mind, it's overtopped by wave upon wave of genius, exuberant, explicative, mad in its quest to be about everything at once and to ring every bell in the English language. Yes it can be tough going sometimes, but here's an all-important hint: read this book aloud.Needless to say, it would never get across an editor's desk intact today. And today we're poorer for that. Something else: no one ever seems to mention how madly funny it is. It's vital to tune in to the humour, I think, if you are to enjoy reading it.“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” is a good book, but doesn't quite rank with Poe's best work, and the "Scarlet Letter" has always seemed to me so narrowly provincial in its concerns that I've never been tempted to read it. But "Moby-Dick" is something else. Strange, digressive, sprawling, experimental, playful... it's a book that takes chances - and sometimes falls flat on its face: for example, not all the digressions work and, as someone already mentioned, the attempts at Shakespearean language are often laughable. But in the end, I think it has to be recognised as a monumental effort.First encountered it at 19 as required reading and found the tale enjoyable but the digressions on whaling baffling and tedious. Some year’s later I am two-thirds of the way through re-reading it. It now seems as though the tale is the most minor and uninteresting part of it. The supposed digressions are the bulk of the work.It is beyond marvellous. The language rings with echoes of the Bible and Shakespeare but the high style is mingled with prose of such simple directness that it barely feels like a 19th century novel at all. For me, what rises endlessly from the pages is a sense of joy and wonder - the sheer joy of being alive and experiencing each moment as something new, and the profound wonder of man in the face of a natural world he may come close to conquering but will never fully understand.I still find myself struggling to get my head around what it all means and quite why it is so great. But great - immense, staggering, colossal - it surely is. A mighty work."Moby-Dick" will be the equivalent of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat at the gates of Heaven. If you liked it, you'll go straight through the gates. If you didn't, well....As a side note, whilst “Moby Dick” remains his towering achievement, works such as "Bartleby the Scrivener", "Billy Budd & Pierre", or "The Ambiguities" are all remarkable in their own ways, whilst utterly different. Alongside "Bartleby", though, for me, Melville's other astonishing achievement is "Confidence Man" - a breathtakingly modern, or perhaps better, "post-modern" book, almost entirely without precursor. Imagine a literary "F is for Fake", & you begin to get a tiny hint of what Melville is up to. Of all writers, he seems to me to be the one who, standing at the very cusp of that moment when literary form is about to find itself cast in stone, is able to invent, it seems as if with every work, a wholly new literary form in & for each of his works. In every sense of the word, his writing & his works are excessive, just as Faulkner's Willbe, & those of Gaddis, &, to an extent, Pynchon. This "excessiveness" is, for sure, a predominantly American phenomenon.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This could have been a shorter book. Melville created multiple chapters explaining and discussing the sperm whale’s head, right whale’s head, different kinds of whale and their classifications. It was like reading an encyclopedia rather than a story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sublime. In this day and age it is awesome to slow down to the speed of this story and remember what it was like before the internet, before even radio, to be out upon the vast sea for years awhaling.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a sea epic adventure story.If you didn't already know this book takes you on the journey of a sea voyage as told by our first person narrator Ishmael, who in boredom, decides to join the crew of a whaling ship called the Pequod. They then and bark on their journey off the coast of Nantucket and search of whales and most infamously the killer white well known to the sailors as Moby Dick. Crazy Captain Ahab seems not only dead set on evening the score with Moby Dick but in his obsession to do so leads the ship and its crew in to peril. Will Ishmael ever reach the shore again alive?Okay so I understand this is a classic, but my readers expect an honest review for me so here it goes...Though beautiful the writing is in this book, Herman Melville is extremely long-winded with his descriptions of pretty much everything. Every little detail takes an entire chapter to explain. The book becomes extremely tedious and even boring to those who aren't really keen on ocean epics. The language in which it is written is borderlined Old English and is beautiful to read. However as I said before the descriptions of things become monotonous with this author. I respect this for the classic that it is. But I'm sure this will probably be my one and only time reading this one. Now I can say that I have read it and move on. I would definitely recommend others to read it once and respect for the classic that it is as well. It is a good story overall, just difficult to read.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I read this when I was very young, and I don't really remember it very well. Another for the list of things to reread now I'm older and wiser!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Meeslepend, maar de onderbrekingen storen toch. Die vertonen trouwens sterke gelijkenis met methode van Herodotus: kritische bevraging van verhalen. Het geheel is niet helemaal geloofwaardig, en vooral het slot is nogal abrupt.Stilistisch vallen de abrupte veranderingen in register en perspectief op, waarschijnlijk toch wel een nieuwigheid. De stijl zelf doet zeer bombastisch, rabelaissiaans aan. Tekening Ahab: mengeling van sympathie en veroordeling
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5good book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A marvellous story that encapsulates the whole whaling industry, and relates the vengeful hunting of a malign white sperm whale by Captain Ahab, who had lost a leg to the creature in their previous encounter.Told through the eyes of Ishmael, a would-be whaler, who signs up to sail on the Pequod along with his formerly-cannibalistic friend Queequeg.It also offers fascinating insights into life in Nantucket, the tiny island community on America's Atlantic coast sustained almost exclusively by the whaling industry.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What an amazing book. A marathon of a book, slow and careful, meting out information on whales and whaling and the culture that leads to the exciting climax. I can see why some people might have trouble making it through the more "academic" sections (in quotes because, well, science has come a long way since the 1850s), and I have a suggestion for you. I actually got this book on CD from Recorded Books, read by Frank Muller, and listened to it every time I was in the car. Frank Muller does such a wonderful job narrating the unabridged story that even the dry descriptions that don't seem to move the plot forward were engaging.
I now think of Moby Dick a spiritual text, as full of anecdotes and lessons and symbolism as it is. And it provides more information about the fascinating world of 19th century whaling than I ever thought I'd know. Can you even imagine taking down a massive sperm whale with nothing more than a tiny boat, some spears, and rope? Do you know what it would be like to watch a whale die? And even after it's killed, how on earth would you get the blubber off of it? If you read Moby Dick, you can "experience" all of these things, complete with the success and tragedy that come with them. Plus, the story is really funny! I don't know why no one told me this before. I was actually laughing out loud at many parts, which I did not expect. I would try to give an example here, but it's sort of like re-telling a joke from Shakespeare--the language is so precise and idiosyncratic that I just end up bungling it. But give it a try, and see if you're not already laughing by the end of the first chapter.
I would highly recommend Moby Dick to anyone, and especially the Recorded Books version read by Frank Muller. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I've been reading this for about ten years now and I am determined to finish it. Melville's writing is incredible. There is a rhythm to it that is almost soothing and that might be the problem. This is the book I read to help me fall asleep and I think that is why its taken me so long to finish it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reading Railsea reminded me that I'd never read this one, and since it happens to be public domain I just downloaded it and got straight into it. And it's great! It sort of reminded me of Neal Stephenson or Umberto Eco, in the way in which it goes off into tangents explaining how something works (generally whale anatomy or hunting equipment in this case) so that you can better appreciate the few dramatic moments of the plot... I love that. And I suppose that a long whaling voyage would be like that, with long stretches of nothing much happening, so it makes sense structurally, too. Well, anyway... I liked this one a lot. Somehow I had not been spoiled for the ending of it, either, which is always nice!