Customer Reviews

Moby Dick, or, the whale (Vintage Classics)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I haven't finished reading the entire book, so I can't comment on the whole thing. But, there is at least one whole section omitted from this version: In the chapter "The Sermon", the hymn sung by the sailors is missing. While this omission does not necessarily detract from the story in a significant way, I like a "classic" such as this one to be complete.

I don't know if it was dumb luck or what have you, but I just happened to be home when I got to Chapter 9 "The Sermon" on the Kindle when I pulled out my actual copy of the book to realize that the Sermon was missing. It was disappointing, but I'm learning to only get my classic books from Project Gutenberg where the books are, to my knowledge/experience, complete in their entirety. Another reason why I will always enjoy a hard copy book over e-reading. I just enjoy the portability of having my magazines, newspapers, and book all in one device too much to give it up.

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Saying that Moby Dick is about whales is like saying the Old Testament is about keeping kosher. Whales are a very tiny amount of a complex whole.

First, it is about obsession. We think first of Ahab's obsession about killing the whale, but careful study of the book shows that there are many obsessions present. Contained within the obsession is that kind of hubris which challenges gods to do their worst.

Second, it is about piety and impiety, about religious belief and sacrilegious beliefs--beliefs plural, because there are idolaters aboard the ship.

But most important, it is about human beings. Everybody is distinguishable from everybody else, unlike many novels in which it is virtually impossible to tell who has what relationship with whom. It is realism of the American, Andrew Jackson, line, not of the European line.

Deconstructionists say that there is at least a hint of homosexuality in the book. They may be right; certainly Queequeg's calling Ishmael his wife is such a suggestion, even though there is no evidence that even Queequeg, much less Ishmael, ever acted upon such a suggestion. However, temporary homosexual activity even among normally heterosexual men is known to be, if not common, certainly not unheard of in any situation in which a group of males are isolated together, without access of any kind to women. A whaling ship, which might not touch land for two or three years, certainly was such an environment.

I cringe when I hear it described as an adventure novel. It is not one, and the abridged editions which remove all of Ishmael's comments which seem extraneous to the book should be burned and replaced with unabridged editions. Those "irrelevancies" are part of the heart and core of the book.

My husband, when at UCLA, was told by friends that Moby Dick was an extremely difficult book, so he decided, for the only time in his life, to buy Cliff Notes. Halfway through the Cliff Notes he decided that Moby Dick was the best novel ever written in any language. He threw away the Cliff Notes and settled down with the book. At the beginning, before the celebrated line "Call me Ishmael," there is a long series of quotations about whales, none of which are really about whales. He is of the opinion that you could remove whales from the book and still have a good novel, but you could not remove Ahab.

Hollywood has made at least two movies about Moby Dick. Both are good movies, but it is clear that the screenwriters did not grok the book.

I recommend this novel not to children, not to undergrads, not even to graduate students unless they are willing and able to take the time to study Moby Dick, using their own contexts as well as the context in which the author was working, to attempt to get a whole on some of the meanings of the text. This assumes that the reader understands that in so complex a novel, and there are few novels more complex, there is not one right meaning. There are multiple meanings which interweave themselves inextricably, while other meanings seem to grow up not from context or subtext but from intertextuality, particularly intertextuality the Bible and specifically the Old Testament.

This is not an easy novel. But it is one worth reading by a reader willing to put in the work necessary to comprehend it in part, realizing that comprehending it in toto is impossible for anyone.

Having spent my teens and twenties with a paperback in my hip pocket, I'm still amazed that I can carry hundreds of books--big books if I want to--on the iTouch in my front pocket--I didn't have the problem with clipped words. That said, I feel that Moby Dick is a book that was waiting for me to read it. I didn't know how funny many parts of it are; for me, it was not a slog through a thick tome, but an adventure shared with others who have also read it. It stands the test of time and is very readable. Has it been waiting for you to read it? Now's the time.

(P.S. The iTouch Kindle app is also good for middle-of-the-night reading without waking my wife.)

Moby Dick is an amazing piece of literature. You forget how good Melville is with his descriptions and how you feel that you're along with him, on shore and on the boat. However, the free Kindle version isn't that great. It lacks a Table of Contents so you can go between chapters, and it also seems to have a strange formatting issue, where the left margin forces the text inward. I've noticed this on a few free Kindle books like Thus Spoke Zarathustra as well.

Minor formatting issues aside, this is still an amazing book that's free. You can't beat it, and should be one of the first books you should load on your Kindle.

A classic. Who am I to criticize a literary great? The Kindle certainly helps - the dictionary is invaluable when reading a book written in "olde english" - being able to look up words I'd not seen before, while in the flow of reading, was invaluable.

This review is broken in two. First is my opinion of the Kindle version of the book which this review is based. Thes econd and longer review is of the story itself.

This is the free version for the Kindle. Overall, the book was fine. I found a hard copy book to compare some pages with and did not notice any issues with the translation to the Kindle as far as the text. I did run into a couple of problems though. neither was major, but if either are of interest, you may want to look at one of the non-free versions.

First, every once in a while, the text would appear indented. This was easily fixed by paging forward then back. I'm not sure of the cause and it did not occur often, just a few times. I also am not aware if this is related to the new version of the Kindle OS as I updated my Kindle while in the middle of reading this book (though I did re-download it).

Second, this book does not have a true Kindle table of contents. There are pages that represent the TOC and they have links. But I ran into an issue viewing them. If I start at the beginning of the book and page down, I see the first page of the TOC and the next time I page, I am past the TOC fully. The only way for me to view the rest of the TOC was to search for a Chapter after the first page. Then I could view the TOC fowards and back as long as I did not go to the first page or past the last. I have no idea of the cause and I could find no fix other than the search technique mentioned.

Finally, after upgrading the OS, I was hoing to get page numbers. This did not occur, so I have to assume this version does not have the ability to show page numbers. Since I was comparing to a hardcopy, it would have been nice (though with such short chapters, it was easy to match the book with the Kindle version).

Not an issue but for those wondering how they are handled, footnotes used throughout the story appear right after the text as opposed to being a link of some type. I had no intention of skipping the footnotes so this did not bother me in any way.

Overall, 3 stars for the Kindle part. For those who truly love this book, you may want to get a better version. Also, for those contemplating reading this book, the fact the Kindle included a dictionary was very helpful as many words used by the author are not common now.

Now for the review of the book. This was tough as I tried to figure out how I would rate this book based on it being a literary classic and taking into account the time it was written versus writing styles of today. I thought the plot was excellent. I loved the characters (especially Stubbs and Queequeg). The problem was with the writing. The author used many styles of writing (first person narrative, third person narrative, stage direction as if this was a play, soliloquies peppered throughout and many chapters related to he study of whales and whaling). Instead of drawing me in with the story, all of these devices ended up making the story thoroughly unenjoyable. I could deal with the narrative changes, though I have no idea why the author felt the need for the stage direction. I do not like soliloquies at all. Information about whales and whaling, though very interesting, are better suited for the likes of National Geographic, not a novel.

When the story got a little interesting, the author found a way to dull it out. It got to the point, I just wanted to finish the book. I didn't care how it ended or what happened. Many people consider this book a classic. I don't. I think the plot and characters in the hands of a better author would have been a fantastic book. Instead, it felt more like a waste of time.

What do I even say. It's great. It's a classic for a reason. Read it in high school, read it as an adult. Yay reading!

I love to pick this book up every 2 or 3 years and just sit with it for a few weeks. A chapter or two a day is al it takes, this is a great read.

This is considered by many to be "the great American novel". It certainly is impressive, but not so much for the storytelling as the enormous amount of research Melville put in the book about whales and the whaling profession. The erudite and often long-winded passages about the anatomy of the whale, the different types of whales, why whales were hunted and their uses were all very interesting, but I felt I was reading a textbook more often than a novel. The very end of the book was the best, when they at last meet the white whale and the book takes us through everyone's different reactions to this event. You know the book can't end well from the beginning, but it was a long and interesting journey through the depths of obsession and the ultimate downfall that becomes those who set their lives upon revenge.