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What are readers saying about Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale: or, the Whale (Penguin Classics)?
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-01-30 10:44:41.
(Language: English)
 
"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--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."Best passage of all time. 
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Glenn posted a review at 2009-03-18 09:05:48.
(Language: English)
When I was in the English program in college we were assigned "Moby Dick." It's a big, thick book and I never got past page five. I had to rely on the Cliff's Notes to get me through the final. However, several years after leaving college I picked up a copy at the library. The first 30 pages were a real struggle to get through, but once I slogged through the first 30, I found myself thoroughly engrossed! Now one of my favorite books.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-11-06 02:35:10.
(Language: English)
I loved it as a boy.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-07-19 02:53:28.
(Language: English)
Just because it's a classic doesn't mean it's any good.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-11-06 02:22:22.
(Language: English)
I enjoyed the first 100 pages and last 20 pages of this book. The middle of the book was extremely long and difficult to read. Melville regularly departs from the narrative to provide cetological minutia that will have little interest to most readers. Even without these distractions, the middle part of the book contains little drama as the Pequod sails the world in search of Moby Dick. It isn't until the final 20 pages when they first encounter the whale. I have to admit I was disappointed by this book. But who am I to critique "one of greatest novels in the English language."
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-07-07 10:56:32.
(Language: English)
I used to read this book over and over when I was a kid. Great story with lots of vivid imagery. Lots of symbolism, too, if you're into that kind of thing. I loved this book as a kid. I'm glad I read it before it was ruined by school-assigned reading.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-03-02 10:35:46.
(Language: English)
Reading Moby Dick was a bit like climbing Everest: it has an enormous reputation, is riddled with expectations, and the oxygen becomes considerably thinner at the top. The novel has so many layers; so much social, political, and religious commentary, that at times you read not for the bigger picture, but a single chapter, a single paragraph, a single line. Moby Dick is a masterpiece - a flawed, epic, American masterpiece - which everyone should challenge themselves to read one time. Lest ye be struck in they breast with a harpoon, heavy with all the hate and heat which burneth in me breast, hot and terrible as the sun!
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-07-12 07:50:28.
(Language: English)
My favorite book of all time. Melville takes some huge risks as an author and writes a book like no other. Either you get drawn into to the poetry and grandeur of Melville's vision or you don't. If you do, the writing transcends prose and reads like poetry, the characters are unforgettable and much imitated by later writers, and the portrayal of nature's power and man's relationship to it is the real deal and not candy-floss environmentalism. If you enjoy unique, challenging books and can't get enough of symbolism and deeper readings of texts, make sure to read this book. If you want a conventional narrative, please don't bother. Why not read some Jack London or something instead?
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-05-03 03:16:10.
(Language: English)
I picked this book up with high hopes and for the first hundred pages or so i was hooked(excuse the pun), the writing was some of the best i have ever read, if a little slow of pace. Unfortunately the pace just never picks up and i found myself labouring through to the chapter which goes into great detail about whales, unsuprisingly i gave up after 150 pages admiting defeat over the pondorous style. I have given Moby Dick an extra star for the first 100 pages, as i'm a generous soul.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-08-18 06:00:08.
(Language: English)
Ishmael was a pussy in the novel. He swooned at the drop of a hat, what a bitch! Capt. Ahab was the baddest Motherf****r around! He got he leg and half his face bit off by a WHALE people and he didnt quit... NO! He stitched himself up with WHALE bone and sinew and got back on the ship. Its hard enough to walk around on a ship with 2 legs, try doing it with a peg leg! BAD ASS!! Gregory Peck was the man in the movies. I would follow you around perditions edge and to the gates of Hell to kill that Damn'ed whale with you CAPTAIN AHAB!! RAWR!!!
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-07-09 02:35:33.
(Language: English)
Moby Dick by Hermann Melville is considered by many to be the greatest American novel ever written. To come up with such credentials is no meek achievement for a novel, that was floating in wilderness for first sixty years of its existence. The 1851 novel was at best ignored by readers and critics alike, till in the beginning of twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence declared it to be "An epic of the sea such as no man has equalled." Thereafter two critics, Carl Van Doren (1921) and F. O. Matthiessen (1941) managed to convince the generations that followed that Moby Dick was not only a great novel, but perhaps one of the greatest work of fiction ever written.My only intention to quote this history before I write my own review is to point out that this whale of a book comes with contexts and content that make it a remarkable study. If I were to judge the book with dead objectivity, I think I would have sided with the reception this book got in the first sixty years of existence. Now I am burdened by biases created by people in last hundred years. But in what follows, I will speak my mind, in spite of what impressionists, critics, symbolists and literary hoi polloi might have inferred due to an imposing reputation that this novel has begun to acquire.Moby Dick is an encyclopedia on whaling. It is an almanac about how the products that can be extracted from the body of a whale. It is a tome that contains endless entries about ships, whaling, oil business and zoology of a whale. As an epic, which it is touted to be, it cannot light a candle to the epics of the ancients, say Homer or Ved Vyas. There is an obsessive Ahab, captain of the ship Pequod, whose only motive is to kill the white whale, Moby Dick. He sets out on the journey with a set of "barbarian" harpooners, and the book presents the imperialistic, (White Man's Burden) thoughts of the age, in an honest portrayal of the non-white races. The ocean roars in the background, sharks chase dead whales, the hunting of whales is described without creating much adventure and then it is usually a notebook entry about this or that.The story in itself can be told in a few lines, but Melville choses to take us on an endless journey, where interlocking ships converse to fill in the interminable sailing time. For all the diversions and digressions into the plethora of facts and rumors Melville manages to supply us with, I would have liked him to put little more effort into those celebrated elements of novel as a form of fiction: plot, characters, story, climax and drama. The characters are "flat", i.e. they don't get altered by experiences. If I would wish to read a fable, I will always prefer the ones by Aesop or the ones by Vishnu Sharma (Panchtantra).On the whole, Moby Dick is a readable book, for it does contain some remarkable passages. With some editing, it could have risen in my estimation, and fared better in the era before symbolists explained that what is presented is not as important, as what metaphors, what allusions, (what illusions) it can inspire. Since the book is sold as the battle between the whale and Captain Ahab, I must add that the face-off between these occurs only in the last thirty pages of a six hundred and fifty-five page version I read. The build-up to the battle begins so far into the novel, that by then most people who read for readings sake, would have given up. The reader is as exhausted as maybe Melville was when he brought his epic struggle of writing this to an end.Surprisingly, while I did find that I had marked at least hundred pages as worth revisiting (and that in my typical estimation makes it an awesome novel), I was more disappointed than not, after finishing the novel. Even in translation, the Russians and the French find favor from me and I feel transformed after reading them. I prefer and prescribe Lawrence, Maugham, Hemingway, Nabokov, Victor Hugo, Virgina Woolf, Dickens, Joyce, Marquez, Tolstoy, Tagore, Dostovesky, Prem Chand, Pamuk, Gogol, Austen, Forster, Rushdie, and many more over Melville. Be it for entertainment, word play, historical or mythical content or for sheer imagery or all together, I will recommend at least a hundred novels that must enter your reading room before this Whale rams its way there.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-08-13 06:00:56.
(Language: English)
Better men than I have attempted to review Moby Dick, so I'll keep this brief. The opening line is awesome ("Call me Ishmael"), and the plot (when you can find it) truly epic in scope. The characters are well formed, even if Ishmael drops off the face of the book about halfway through. However, the book is about three times as long as it should be, dragged down by endless philosophizing and symbolism. I realize it has a lot to say, if you take the time to unpack its philosophy, but by the end I honestly didn't give a damn.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-06-02 02:25:24.
(Language: English)
Moby Dick is a fascinating and imaginative tale and it is my favorite American novel. I must admit that some of the descriptions of whales had me cursing maledictions, but in the end I was enthralled by Melville's philosophy and metaphysics. Also, I was thrilled with the amount of symbolism that Melville used because it forced me to continually look below the surface. Believe it or not, there was also a great deal of humor in this robust book, esp. in the beginning when Ishmael meets Queequeg for the first time. Ah, there is too much to say on this one, and I do not want to give anything away, so I recommend this book to anyone with any interest. Finally, if you are looking for a love story you will not find it in this novel. There are no women on the Pequod, which is the boat the crew goes whaling on. Ha, perhaps love was a subject that was off limits for American authors at the time.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-08-09 02:42:07.
(Language: English)
Critics have noted inconsistencies in the text (regarding the description of the ship, for example) but the book remains one of the most important works of American literature in spite of this, which indicates just how amazing most of the text is. By way of analogy, Moby Dick is to The Great Gatsby as The White Album is to Sgt. Peppers: not as meticulously crafted, but a swooning epic that is gorgeous at best, and remains readable at its most tedious (the chapter Cetacea, for example). The main difficulty in reading is in interpretation: the only thing that would be worse than reading it as an allegory would be reading it as an adventure story.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-06-15 01:15:01.
(Language: English)
it is a bit difficult to understand the dialogs
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-02-03 06:56:26.
(Language: English)
A masterpiece
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-08-16 12:35:36.
(Language: English)
Hardly what you'd describe as a boring read, surely! I can see why some of the chapters, especially those detailing (for example) cetological physiology, whales and the law, and Right whales jawbones can be seen as boring, but I found they provided opportunities for eloquently conveyed insights into that which I previously knew nothing about. After all - knowledge seldom wasted. Yes, the book was long, but I think that's only reasonable given that he encompassed - in my opinion rather brilliantly - a fundamentally alien environment and lifestyle whilst still being able to pick out universally applicable human traits, from the narrator's strong attachment to his native American companion to Ahab's monomania. Though the end felt abrupt, it was overall, a very powerful read, and rightfully a triumphant classic of american literature.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-03-24 09:23:18.
(Language: English)
In one word..overrated. If I ever wanted to know this much about 19th century whaling I probably would have picked this up a lot sooner. And yeah I know it's some elaborate allegory and it has its humerous moments, but aside from that I find myself bored out of my mind throughout. Methinks this is a one time read. Pretty good so far. Suprisingly funny at times. I know more about how to kill a whale now so..I guess..that's good?
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Maria posted a review at 2011-03-27 01:13:31.
(Language: English)
Bisection of the whale. That's pretty much all of it...
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-06-20 11:55:07.
(Language: English)
If there was some substance in this book streched out among it's pages, let me know. I read 200 pages, and still hadn't glimpsed the mail plot. Perhaps it was right around the corner, but after 200 pages, I expect to at least know a bit about the characters, and not be bombarded with story after story of random characters of no importance. For example, I remember a section (and perhaps my boredom made it seem like more) of around 25/30 pages about the family of the man who made the candles in an inn where the main character was staying...and the inn wasn't even important! He was just staying there for one night!
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Colleen posted a review at 2010-07-28 06:04:08.
(Language: English)
Good book. Worth reading.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-10-11 06:34:25.
(Language: English)
Call me Ishmael . . . What a famous first line! Loved this book!
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-11-15 09:19:16.
(Language: English)
tough going!
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-07-19 04:53:37.
(Language: English)
longlonglonglongloooooooooong. some parts were very confusing, and cliffsnotes saved me there... my english teacher would be appalled if she heard that. but i also think he had amazing style as an author like how he'd deliver the observances he'd make on humankind, his use of metaphor, and the complexity of ahab's character. i think the extra chapters were there to help people understand how things worked, but in this time people would rather just skip over them. I know i wanted to. i didnt understand the religious references and i can't say i'll read it again anytime soon, but i can't say i wouldnt recommend it. i had a lot of trouble following but i do remember i loved queequeg :] the part about whale penises, though...:X
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Marcel posted a review at 2009-09-08 06:23:53.
(Language: English)
I thought if it wasn't Huston's worst movie, it was close, nailed to the mast by a horrid Gregory Peck performance. The only saving grace, for me, was that Huston, who thought little of Bradbury, beat the piss out of him on the set one day. Not that I've anything against Bradbury, other than his poetry, but I still like the story. Long novels are generally thought of (at least by most reviewers) as a sign of weakness and self-indulgence these days, rather than the attempts at masterpiece they were understood to be in the days of MOBY DICK, DON QUIXOTE, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, WAR AND PEACE, and so many other epic tales. It was Melville who said --"No great and enduring volume can be written on the back of a flea." MOBY DICK passes the same test of almost never descending into being just a period piece. It was outside of time when it was published and, in most ways, still is. That's why Bloom's primary word for describing the single quality that sets great poetry and literature apart is "strangeness" -- not in the sense of whackiness or weirdness for their own sakes, but a certain quality that doesn't fit the period-piece smug agreements and prejudices of the literature of their times. Shakespeare, Whitman, Melville, and, say, Emily Dickinson have, perhaps, nothing in common in their work except that anti-period-piece, deep-core "strangeness" that allows their work to last beyond their lifetimes (or the lifetimes of all their era's prejudices) and give something new to each generation of serious readers. Unfortunately, educators from public school elementary grades to universities are -- due to the adults' cowardice and sheer fatigue at the bovine slowness of their students -- doing exactly that. Bored by Beowulf? Here, here's J.K. Rowling. Can't handle Moby Dick? Here, here's a "graphic novel" version of the Hulk. Any "mistake" in writing is harmful because it threatens to topple Blake's "willing suspension of disbelief" that is necessary to enjoy any mimetic art -- a novel, a film, theater. But there are mistakes and there are mistakes. In "Hamlet," the prince is obviously a young man of no more than 20 in the opening scenes yet a few weeks later -- in the chronology of the play -- when Hamlet and the Gravedigger (his only worthy interlocutor in terms of wit) are bandying back and forth, the Gravedigger points out that Yorick was buried 23 years before, when Hamlet was a boy of at least 7 and perhaps already a teenager. Where did that extra decade and more come from? And Horatio -- who is a contemporary of Hamlet's as a student -- remembers when Hamlet's father rode forth, dressed in just such armor as the ghost wears, to do battle against the Poles. That would make Horatio in his late 40's, at least. Similarly, in almost every Shakespearean play, there are anachronisms -- errors of things set in the wrong time -- such as, in "Julius Caesar", books having pages, Brutus and Marc Antony preaching from pulpits, etc. Are these "mistakes" that ruin "Hamlet" and "Julius Caesar" comparable to the lack of understanding of viewpoint in The Da Vinci Code? I think you can see why they're not, any more than the disparity in the number of crewmen on the Pequod "ruins" MOBY DICK. In one case -- say the viewpoint idiocy in a bestseller -- the mistake results from the lack of mastery of the craft. It's comparable to beginning writers using what are called "said-bookisms" -- "he pouted," "she growled," "he gritted," etc instead of just "said." (Or better yet, nothing at all.) Often said-bookisms, so encouraged by teachers from 1st grade through high school and invariably the sign of an amateur who doesn't know any better or read very well, devolve into "barnyardisms" -- "he cackled," "she grunted", "he crowed" etc. This is just bad writing. In the other cases -- such as Hamlet's "age" and books having pages in Roman days when books were scrolls and the number of crewmen on the largely metaphorical Pequod -- the "mistakes" arise largely from the fact that the author had moved the writing to a higher level where such attention to time- and place-bound details simply didn't matter that much. I still disagree that poverty in any way justifies theft. (Metallica's incidental success be damned.) I listened to too many American college students from almost disturbingly affluent homes whining that they "had to download" illegal music from the Net because "they didn't have enough money to buy it all." This no more works for them as an excuse than it does for developing nations pilfering intellectual property protected under copyright elsewhere. It's theft. Comparing copyrighted material created by individual artists to Linux versus Microsoft is specious -- if a committee of programmers somewhere can write MOBY DICK as shareware and launch it gratis into the datasphere, go for it. But real artistic creation is not and never will be a committee or group effort. The man or woman who creates such a thing deserves to be compensated for it, and thieves who steal it without compensation are no more justified by their poverty status than is the burglar who loots your house and later gives the excuse that "I didn't have a surround-sound system that good so I had to take it." Stan Freberg had several famous mentor-monsters, the most terrible of which was the Broadway producer David Merrick. For Ray Bradbury it was one man -- John Huston -- who, he said, plucked this unknown little Iowa writer with his crewcut out of Iowa and flew him and his wife to his castle in Ireland so that he, young Ray, could write the film version of "Moby Dick." Hey, I can't even remember the music in SCOTLAND PA. But after seeing it, I began to wonder if all Shakespeare's plays weren't really comedies, cause it seemed that MacBeth certainly played more easily as one. 'Course that's a tendency of mine -- I'm already convinced that MOBY DICK and a good bit of western lit that's taken very seriously is actually wildly comic. I meant to that as a compliment to Melville. I think Moby Dick is one of the all-time great comedies and has been misread for the past couple of centuries. Just check out the Rube Goldberg image that ends the book--the novel is full of them, full of borderline slapstick comic images. Ahab's death is a freaking laugh riot...I think was intended to be read as a comedy. DAVID COPPERFIELD requires the first-person p-o-v, as does MOBY DICK, but please notice how and why Melville allowed "Ishmael's" third-person-restricted p-o-v to grow into the omniscient. But in the case of Lanark, such criticism is largely irrelevant for the same reason that criticism of the whaling chapters in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is irrelevant. The correction of these “flaws” would rob both books of their unique genius. The hallmark of an original, eccentric writer is that what makes the writer different, even in a maddening sense, cannot be separated out from what makes the writer good. Gray’s rough edges are the rough edges of what can only be termed prophecy. The only cartoon I've seen that has flashes of brilliance is South Park. That Mel Gibson episode...Haven't laughed so hard since I read Moby Dick. The script for that version of "Moby Dick" was adequate, but most reviewers at the time found the film missing some vital energy and tended to blame Gregory Peck as Ahab. Word is that Patrick Stewart was much more Ahabish in a recent remake. It's my opinion that Melville's novel is one of those idiosyncratic works of genius that will never translate adequately to film or vision; its literary impact, created largely through digression, is simply so much greater than the sum of its visual and plot parts. The operative word in "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is after the comma . . . "Stupid." The phrase is addressing you as "Stupid." Writers shouldn't do that. Condescending towards one's readership is sometimes a recipe for bestsellerdom, but is also, invariably, a recipe for literary disaster (in terms of how short-lived and shallow your work is destined to be.) Sometimes writers' styles are simple. Sometimes that simplicity is part of a complex plan. More often it is just a matter of being childish, poorly educated, and extremely limited in one's craft. The partially educated writing for the preliterate. Using "simple words" all the time proves nothing. Newspapers in America do that because they've decided that their average reader can't handle any vocabulary over that approved for 11-yr-olds. And even then they rarely choose the right word. (KATRINA DECIMATES GULF COAST!) In "The Tragedy of King Lear," Shakespeare included more than a hundred and fifty new words -- new to the English language! -- that were probably unfamiliar to his mixed-class, mixed-education audience, but which he trusted them to figure out from Latin roots and their context. A hundred of those newly coined words had come from Montaigne's essays, which Shakespeare had just read in translation. Thank God he never adopted the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" algorithm. Nor did Melville in "Moby Dick." Nor Saul Bellow in any of this novels. Nor James Joyce. Nor Nabokov. Nor Grass. Nor Barth. Nor Pynchon. Nor Ondaatje. Nor Hemingway -- however deceptively simple his prose and word choice look to those unwilling or unable to look more carefully. DEAD MAN does have a Cormac McCarthy feel. Good call. And it's a great film. Lance H has always been an icon here, from NEAR DARK on. And I'm glad to hear that not everyone thinks I'm whack about Moby DIck.
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