Moby Dick has a bad (high) ratio of “people who try to read it like a thriller novel” to “people who read it for what it is”.

Huh, that’s surprising to me. The beginning details about the whales and whatnot surprised me but once I got going it was just marvelous. I’m not a very good book critic but it just had such a sensation of the sea and being crew on a ship run by an obsessive (that in itself somewhat interesting in that the narrator is just side character to the protagonist). And I loved the characterization of his obsession as a “cruel emperor” and the way men love water (“set a man to walking and he will infallibly lead you to water”).

It’s been a long time since I read the book but it was doubtless one of the most enjoyable I’ve read.

I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or whatever in his novels.

Moby Dick is often quite high on the lists of greatest novels of all time. It seems to me that all of that stuff you think is not part of the good novel trying to get out is part of why it’s considered great, not merely good

I rather take the tedious parts as Ishmael seeing the divine in the world of tedious particulars, although such kludgy pointers as me saying that destroy the real meaning, as the thing represented itself