“Call me Ishmael.” Possibly the most popular and recognized first line of any book and all classics, even by those who have never read it before.

Moby Dick is about Ishmael, as he joins a boat in search for the great white whale who stole Captain Ahab’s leg and cause various other troubles among the sea.

One of the greatest classics ever written, I’m surprised it has taken me this long to read the book in its entirety. I’ve heard much about it, but for some reason never had to read it in school and/or never finished it. Now that I have, I can tell that Melville’s catching tale of revenge and survival on the sea helped him create this amazing story. The weaving in of fact and fiction on a whaling boat makes the reader feel almost as if the tale were true and not an amazing creation.

Call me impressed. The blurb on the jacket of this audio book calls it a “breathtaking masterwork,” but actually, it’s better than that! It is a epic and staggering tale every bit as big as its subject matter--the largest of all living creatures and the edacious, relentless men who hunt and kill them.

Melville’s language is grandiloquent and a bit archaic, almost like the King James Bible. Although some might find that pretentious, I think it works in its context. My experience of the book may even have been enhanced by listening to it rather than reading it: the language is so elevated that, like a Shakespearian play, it is more moving when heard than when read. Melville says somewhere near the end of the book that one should write big stories about big subject matters, not about small things. And indeed, this book is not about mice or fleas; it is about whales and whaling.

Moby Dick was first published in 1851. The plot is of course familiar to most; beginning with the first sentence “Call me Ishmael” to the obsessed quest by Captain Ahab on the whaleship Pequod to catch and kill the whale that severed his leg, this story has been swimming through the culture in every medium from music to movies (including adaptations like “Jaws) and television.

Melville can be forgiven for utilizing a sprinkling of omens and preternaturally prescient shamans, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s witches, to create a foreboding atmosphere. His characters were superstitious and would have attributed such portentousness to ordinary coincidences. And what wonderful characters they are! Dickens himself would have been proud to have limned them, especially the “pagan savages,” the harpooners named Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo, and Fedallah.

This is not just a novel. It is also an encyclopedic treatise on the subject of whales and whaling, relating not only what scientists of the time knew, but also much of the lore (obviously exaggerated, but in many ways more interesting than the truth) prevalent in the fishery.

In the performance to which I listened (“Unabridged Classics” on 18 CDs), Frank Muller did a superb job of mastering accents and employing different voices for different characters. This book sets a very high standard for other fiction. It deserves its rating as one of the greatest novels in the English language.

(JAB) ( )

still reading, 5 chapters in, so far lovely to read and allready know i want to reread it ( )

The Folio Limited Edition of this book is really stunning, one of the most beautiful books I own. ( )

I'm grateful I was never required to read this for school, because it's such a crazy dense chaotic euphoria of complex symbolism, that the reader needs to be voluntarily engaged with the insanity on every level.

In reality the story of Ahab and Moby Dick is a frame story; I could easily believe that most of the text was written without the story or those characters explicity in mind. Melville's nuts and obviously has Shakespeare whirling in his brain as he writes -- many passages are sylistically straight out of Macbeth or King Lear.

The narrator -- or the author -- seems as monomaniacally obsessed with whales and whaling as Ahab is with the White Whale. If you're not willing to be drawn into that obsession, it's probably not going to be a successful text.

There's something Italo Calvino says, about the longing for the naive reading experience -- that books are spoiled by coming to them with expectations. Nothing creates expectations like "The Great American Novel", or "You Must Read This and Love it Or You Get An F", or many of the other accretions which spoil the way we approach literature. Moby-Dick, in particular, I think, requires the naive and willing engagement of the reader. ( )