Redburn's pretty fascinating both for the character development of the upstate New York hayseed gone seaman and for the descriptions of live on board ship at the time.

White-Jacket strikes me as less successful; interesting and effective chiefly for its account of the cruelties of the US Navy as an employer in the 1840s, though there is a fair amount of rewarding character depiction. Of the five Melville novels before Moby-Dick, White-Jacket is in my opinion the least rewarding to a reader today.

I write about all this more fully on my blog at cshere.blogspot.com.

Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?

Redburn: 4 stars
White-Jacket: 5 stars
Moby-Dick: 5,000 stars

I love the Library of America editions, though I've only read Moby Dick in this one. There's so much metaphorical ambiguity in Moby Dick that it's hard not to arrive at a subversive interpretation. The star of the novel is Ahab, a man whose obsession is so profound that obsession itself becomes the theme, and the target, of Melville's harpoon. The question is what was Melville really talking about... personal obsession, political obsession, philosophical obsession, and where is the dividing line between obsession and ambition? How much sacrifice is tolerable to attain one's goals? Is extremism in the defense of liberty defensible? There are far more questions than answers here, but they are great questions. I sort of wish Melville had been more focused in his approach, but I suspect there was a reason he was not. He might have been crazy, but not as crazy as Ahab.

A work of unique genius, a parable of American greed and madness. Flecked with lots and lots of whale lore, of course, but also with rising horror and looming tragedy. A true American masterpiece.

The Great American Novel

Can't believe I haven't read it. I read the fussy, stuffy-but-psychologically-complex Hawthorne in college and by-passed the white whale. Catch up time.

Harold Bloom's described it as one of the great narratives: monumental text of the human condition that was far ahead of its time

its....ok. its not the best though. there were some characters i liked, like... Starbucks!!!!!

This is just for Moby Dick - I couldn't find the edition I read on GoodReads, so I picked this one...

Ok, that was a monster of a book. I think it took me two months to read. It hasn't taken me two months to read a book since I was 10 and tried to read the Lord of the Rings.

Anyhoo - I am not really going to try write a review of this book. I do think I'll read it again and I do think it is more than deserving of its fame and high regard.

Even taking so long to read it I feel that I rushed it. It really needs to be savored, even memorized in key quotes and scenes. But in other parts it is just painful to read and you feel like you have to force yourself through the endless descriptions of comparative whale anatomy, whale classification, whale lifecycles, whale heads, whale fins, whale vertebrae, whale teeth, whale history, whale art, historical whale captains, whale watching methods, whale blubber extraction, whale ambergris, whale boning, whale hooking, whale harpooning, whale growth, whale foreheads, whale noses, whale eyes, whale scrimshaw, whaling boats, whale, whale, whale, whale, whale....

But it serves a purpose and Moby Dick makes my short list of "Great Novels" even if it in no way is it a gripping or even necessarialy fun read.

Great story but too much whale natural history.

I really enjoyed Melville's writing style in the beginning, but got bored during the middle of the book after chapter and chapter of whaling details (like so many other readers). But all in all, it was good, and I find myself missing not having it to read. You kind of get used to having it around (it is almost 900 pages after all...)

king of allegories, prince of whales! read annually