printsofwhales 's review for:

Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville

3.0

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I felt like Melville couldn't decide if he wanted to write a non-fiction book about whaling or a novel about a crazed whaleboat captain bent on revenge. Chapters that moved the story along (episodes in which more of Capn. Ahab's past/character are revealed) were interspersed by Ishmael's extremely detailed accounts of whale biology (19th century style!) and whaleboat operations. Luckily, my mother's edition of this book explained that Melville originally intended to write more of a memoir of whaling, but his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, convinced him into making the book a novel, instead. While interesting and well-written, the book was really neither memoir nor novel, but a proto-mashable of both.