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Comment by firefoxd | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm a few years too late but I highly recommend reading Moby Dick. The shear amount of information in the book in parallel to the story makes believe Melville had access to Wikipedia in the 1800s.

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This is a free audiobook of Moby Dick I listen to in the car when NPR is too gloomy. I have listened to it a lot lately. https://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series is also rich with detail about sailing in the Age of Sail more generally (with some in-depth details about whaling in many of the books). I've been slowly working my way through them for the past year, and I feel like I've learned so much about what it took to sail a ship in those days.

The Aubry-Maturin books are fantastic. They are a strange mix of adventure, history, survival, romance, sailing manual, and comedy.

If you like them, also check out the nine book series The Baroque Cycle by Neil Stephenson. It's similarly filled with adventure, history, sailing, mining, intrigue, swashbuckling, mathematics, chemistry, science, economics, bloody swordfighting, and cartography. So you know... normal Neil Stephenson books.

Also, raise those royal topgallants, what is this, a whaling ship?!

I must say reading with modern perspective the at points gleeful descriptions of whaling was harrowing in a way that I don't think was intentional. 19th century really was quite a dark period in human history, I'd say far more so than the so called dark ages.

Among the classics I read, this was the only one I did _not_ like. It's an interesting read if one enjoys the setting of a whaling ship of that period. The story itself, I didn't find engaging at all.

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