Reviews - Moby Dick | The StoryGraph

5.61k reviews for:

This is my 3 1/2 time reading this book. It remains one of my most favorite of all time. A lot of people think of Moby Dick and expect it to be some consistently dense, hard-to-read tome. It is dense at times, but for every dense part there is equal parts surprising humor and levity. And there are so many dick jokes to be made. Really, if you ever feel up to it, give Moby Dick a chance. The last three chapters are some of the best written pieces in history.

ejallain's review against another edition

3.0

I really wanted to like this and actually thought I might. I was intrigued with the first part which introduced the narrator (Ishmael) and the colorful Queequeg. But Melville seemed to abandon the development of these characters once the whaling voyage got underway. Then it became a tedious slog for me. My attention waned. I think there may be some great stuff in this book. Others certainly seem to think so. But focus is required to absorb it. Focus that my distracted squirrel of a mind can't seem to manage.

This was my first classic I chose in my quest to read from a classic of literature each morning. I'll try to choose something a bit less challenging next. Perhaps after I build up my classic reading muscle, I would be able to get more out of challenging works like this.

BTW ... I welcome recommendations for classics to consider.

kaithrin's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous funny tense slow-paced

Someone recommended this to me as “600 pages of whale facts, 100 pages of Ahab & the whale” and they were not wrong

maggie_sotos's review against another edition

5.0

I grabbed this off the library shelves as kind of a joke, because I hated Moby Dick from high school and laughed at the idea of a graphic novel adaptation.

Y'all -- it's GOOD. Mercifully the author selects only about 10% of the full novel to depict via graphics, so it's more like "Moby Dick Jr.". But the artistic interpretation is beautiful. The graphics and layout are great (though a handful of times I got confused by the dialogue flow). I thought the choice of black and white was stylistically fantastic, and some of the panels I can still see when I close my eyes.

If nothing else, I am grateful I now have a cursory understanding of what the hell happens in Moby Dick, and just how dark and disturbing of a story it truly is. I want to buy this and reread it all the time. #justiceforfedallah

lauri1962's review against another edition

1.0

Can't finish it and I know I should, really don't like this book. Moby Dick is my Moby Dick...

betterbookssubstack's review against another edition

5.0

In contention for the great American novel.

sarah_grange's review against another edition

1.0

I hated this book. Cool, Herman Melville, you wrote a very detailed account of whaling with some wild, intense characters. But, it took me two years to read it and in the end I was just skipping the whaling chapters to make it through.

Also, it portrayed terrible stereotypes of non-whites. I hated it.