Review: Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I would not have finished this if I had not been listening to the audiobook. Ishmael is not what I would consider a reliable narrator and I often wondered how he could know private conversations between Captain Ahab and Starbuck.

My biggest complaint about the book was all the tangents. I remember early on there being a tangent about the color white and think, alright already, I get it. You are foreshadowing death, enough. That is the first example of when a tangent hits you over the head with something. At times the narration would speed up, but most of the time it was slow, and if the narration did speed up there was sure to be a tangent to slow it down.

By the end of the novel I was waiting for the white whale to not be real and the book to end with a "ha! Got ya! There is no white whale." After the slow meanderings of the rest of the novel, the ending hit quickly, and without the epilogue I would have hated the book. Instead of hating the book I feel generally ambivalent about it. I was hoping to gain some incite into the books that are based off of Moby-Dick, but I don't think I gained any new perspective on these past reads. I have really enjoyed books that are based off of Moby-Dick, and now I'm surprised since I did not care much for the original. This is not a book I would recommend, but it is a book that is frequently referenced, so reading it for me seemed like it would add to my enjoyment of other novels. I don't know if that will be true, but I hope so, otherwise I just spent 25 hours listening to a novel that I enjoyed disliking.

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