they just don’t make em like this anymore.

This is certainly the most accessible of Melville's works so far. He spins a competent narrative from the perspective of a likeable, precocious, and often pitiable, semi-autobiographical narrator. I enjoyed this journey because I enjoyed the relatable clash of reverent expectation with sobering reality. Redburn's Liverpool adventures are a stirring example of this.

Moreover, while this is perhaps less grandiose than Melville's preceding forays, it finds a strength in its frankness. Redburn, too, strikes me as a convincing youth, and his boyish incredulity shaped and molded much of the narrative. It may essentially be a work of fiction, but a sense of probity permeates every page turned. It also just feels more focused, a trait in which Melville's earlier attempts often left me wanting.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this, particularly when compared to its pre-Moby Dick contemporaries, and unlike said works, I feel I could recommend Redburn to almost anyone.

Harpoon practice.

Trying to ease my way into Moby Dick, I read this and found that I was drawn to Melville’s language: his way of phrasing agrees with me, and much of the phrasing is quite witty.
“Oh! He was exceedingly merry; and taking a long inspiration of smoke…letting the vapor slowly wriggle and spiralize out of his mouth.”
“Lucky would it be for the pretensions of some parvenus, whose souls are deposited at their banker’s, and whose bodies but serve to carry around purses, knit of poor men’s heartstrings, if they could easily define the difference between them and the rest of humanity.”
“Poverty, poverty, poverty, in almost endless vistas; and want and woe staggered arm in arm along these miserable streets.”
“Aboard of her were…pilots, fellows with shaggy brows, and muffled in shaggy coats, who sat grouped together on deck like a fire-side of old bears, wintering in Aroostook.”

A lot goes on here: the naive, fantasizing, idealistic young man goes to sea wearing his brother’s hunting jacket; he comes back with a “degree” from the school of hard knocks. His friend Harry doesn’t learn (e.g. a marvelous vignette of Harry forced to climb high on the rigging). Redburn also learns about the human condition ( in Launcelott’s Hey in a heart-rending episode— the finest I’ve read since Sir Walter Scott’s Sweenie drowns in The Antiquary).

There are “modern problems” of the American kind to be found here: the race and immigration dilemmas, what to do when an epidemic breaks out onboard (“when an everlasting Asiatic cholera is forever thinning our ranks”), how to avoid quarantine in port (throw everything from steerage overboard so no one will know), how to avoid being cheated, what to do about atheists or believers, how to ignore poor folks, etc.

Needless to say, Redburn finds and has experiences with evil men (Jackson), gay men (Harry), and many other categories of men (women are extremely rare in this book).
It’s all about life!

It lacks the same humor and sensibility from Moby Dick, but keeps all the charm and sadness. In fact it's exceptionally sad. But it's immersive and real--a fair picture of life, with a few grand American moments.

Two years before Moby Dick, this is at least in part autobiographical. At times wordy, it is also powerful at others and worth reading. Lots of sailor jargon will be explained in Moby Dick.

"Redburn" is a fictional narrative based on Melville's own experience, young boy's first voyage into the hostile world, and the feeling is that of reading his personal journal.
Of course, Melville's Moby-Dick, great in its theme and style is a brighter sun to me. Nevertheless, "Redburn" has the same voice and passion. I enjoyed the book.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this one. I like Melville's heartbreaking description of poverty and I love the part where Redburn attempts to navigate the city with an old guidebook and meditates on the way that all books are a sort of guidebook. His character, Jackson, is also a proto-Ahab in some ways. At the same time, it is clear that Melville is holding back when it comes to the metaphysical meditations and intertextual references. The fact that Melville is reserved in these references makes sense when considering the reception of his previous book, Mardi, but I still find it saddening when an author needs to dilute what makes him so special. This book also has less of the humor that Melville presents in his best works. I think I will study this book more carefully to continue my study of Melville's depictions of religion, but I don't love this book as much as most of his other things I have read.

Yeah!

good old herman. this was written before "moby dick," (i believe) and is not quite so elloquent, but melville still has some beautiful passages tucked in there. as with "moby dick," there are a few long dry chapters that you will have to endure.

This was Melville at his most restrained book, and, though it diverged from the eccentric wont in his style, it was too enjoyable for me to discredit or discount it. The tale of youth and innocence lost, the general coming of age, as well as it being a fascinating guide on maritime life. If one is apprehensive about testing the waters of Melville, then Redburn might be the safest, and rewarding book to begin with.

I read the Northwestern-Newberry Edition, edited by Hayford, Parker and Tanselle. You'll find this exact text in the Library Of America's edition of the works of Herman Melville.
I won't go into the plot in any detail. You'll find Goodreads has a thumbnail sketch of the book and you'll see that other reviewers go into its twists and turns. My points are as follows:
1) It starts off as a reminiscence about the youth of the narrator. For about the first third, REDBURN is a poignant look back on the narrator's childhood illusions and youthful misconceptions.
2) The book becomes a very loosely knit series of observations about routines about a commercial vessel. It then becomes a condemnatory portrait of contemporary Liverpool, but as an exposé of civic neglect, it equals the best of such writing in the mid-19th century. It does not surpass such writing, though. As Dickensian as the narrator's discovery of a woman sheltering her starving children in a little cubby beneath the sidewalk; as close to Dostoevsky as this gets, somehow Melville remains an editorialist here. Dickens can shame the reader. (At one point in BLEAK HOUSE he stops the narrative to essentially tell the reader the horror just described might as well be put at the reader's door. It works, as only Dickens can make it work.) But moral outrage is not Melville's true strength, as skillfully as he expresses it. This part of the book stalls. Melville's chapters are generally short (the exception being in his first novel, TYPEE) and each chapter is quite distinct. So, far from boring the reader, Melville leads you through an academic point lasting three or four pages, the typical length of one of his chapters, and a different point about some other subject occurs in the next. The effect is to leave the reader thinking nothing revelatory is going to occur. But the writing is so skillful that the sheer brevity of the chapters may make the reader put it aside, thinking nothing is going to happen, until the final third of the books heralds the entrance of a character worthy of Robert Louis Stevenson, the narrator's friend Harry Bolton.
3) Herman Melville, who wrote this book in just over two months at the age of 29, suddenly puts a dashing plot and a compelling relationship into the story. The narrator (Wellingborough Redburn) meets a boy just like himself and, on an adventure to the seedy side of London, finds his friend becoming very decadent. It is absolutely the case of the narrator watching someone just like himself. But Harry is going downhill. Redburn is not. The description of the den of iniquity the two visit is clearly a tonic to Melville: It gives him a chance to rival Henry Fielding. It is this part of the book that makes it stand out.
Along the way, and throughout, of course, are incredible descriptions of particular characters. Jackson is a mean old guy; I think Joseph Conrad based one of his main characters on Jackson. The captain is a two-faced tyrant and a real study of the blandness of authority. Interestingly, both foreshadow major characters in Melville's later fiction. Jackson is a more theatrical villain than Claggart (of BILLY BUDD) but, because he's so transparent, he's oddly more sympathetic. Captain Riga (who actually has some of Claggart in him) is a more realistically villainous guy than Ahab (of MOBY-DICK), but only because his villainies or in a strictly realistic novel. Redburn, who, at one point tells us he feels himself to be "a sort of Ishmael," is a more down-to-earth, or everyday, version of MOBY-DICK's narrator. There are so many phrases and passages in REDBURN which anticipate MOBY-DICK that I think it is JUST arguable that REDBURN is a prequel to MOBY-DICK. What is indisputable is that a lot of the very phrases in MOBY-DICK were running through Herman melville's mind at this time. Two years later he would write MOBY-DICK. The similarities go right up to the last page of REDBURN.
So, I do suggest you read this. Parts of it will bore you, but you'll see each part has merit. You will learn a fair amount about life at sea in the nineteenth century. Also, tell me if you don't think the chapter "Carlo" has the same admiration for an itinerant musician as Dylan shows when he sings "Mr. Tambourine Man."