>reading moby dick online. >get to the end, 400 pages. >end of vol 1. >theres a vol 2 (2024)

Should have read it on Kindle, mine was only 358 pages total

Moby Dick is a book about pursuing your monomania even if it knowingly brings you ruin and destruction. it's not about whales.

when i was like 12 i read a shorter version that was around 150 pages, it was atrocious, i can't even imagine reading the whole book

It's about a big white penis

Describe the taste of whale shit to me

>bros...I can't take any more of this whale shit
Then drop it. I don't see what's the problem.

I genuinely think Moby Dick is the true NPC filter. You MUST be lacking in soul or consciousness if you can read it and not love it. I don't feel this objectively about any other work of literature. Btw if you don't understand what "feeling objectively" means you are definitely incapable of parsing non-mechanical ideas of the human spirit (you are an NPC).

He was gay, Herman Melville?

Is it okay to skip the cetology chapters, or will I miss something important?

I got two chapters in and quit. I didn't even get to the whale stuff yet. But I hate whales IRL so I doubt I'd like this. Just him roaming the town looking for a hotel room in chapter 2 and veering off into a full page tangent over the Bible was enough to drive me away.

Blood Meridian is just Moby Dick with a big bald man instead of a whale

> But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little Black went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

did they really make candles from whale sperm back then?

The character of Ahab is genuinely one of the greatest character of all time. When he appears in a chapter, he dominates everything, he takes the stage like the best of all Shakespearean characters and delivers either rants, soliloquies, or philosophical musings aside in the best manner contrived by any author of any century. His plight has so much depth of meaning, so much symbolism, so much of that which is human it can not fail to move even the most stoic of readers. Ishmael's friendship with Queequeg is also very well handled, and the different backgrounds of the characters serves to highlight the fact that camaraderie can transcend all arbitrary differences. Even the much maligned whale encyclopedia chapters are fine and serve to enrich the story by both immersing the reader in the subject matter while also highlighting the main character's own background as a former teacher/academic. I personally loved it from cover to cover and would highly recommend.

For me, it was that chapter about the shipbuilder who reduced human beings to machines

Melville was a fricking Autist and it shows.

I knew a guy IRL like this. Literally obsessed with whales. Whale license plate, whale stickers on his car, whale PC desktop wallpaper. He got a Master's in whales. Lived and breathed the damned things. Ended up working at a gas station, last I heard.

Fun fact, the title is an anagram for M'boy Dick

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