Moby Dick by Herman Melville
📖 604/604
(07.02.2025)
Just finished Moby-Dick. I can’t even right now…
Slightly (ship)wrecked.
Loved it, btw.
Will leave these notes up until I choose my next read.
From The Divine Comedy to Moby-Dick — apparently, my reading friend and I like our classics epic and slightly unhinged.
Even though I’ve been genuinely excited to dive into Moby-Dick, I couldn’t shake this nagging fear that it might be… well, a total slog. (Despite so many people insisting it’s actually really good.)
But wow, that is not the case!
This book is nothing like I expected. It’s surprisingly readable, darkly funny, and incredibly well written. Honestly? I’m kind of blown away.
Now the real challenge is slowing down, because my reading buddy hasn’t even started it yet. 😂
Updates:
06.23.2025
You know, one of the things I always heard from people who’d read Moby-Dick was how boring they thought the whale and whaling chapters were. (Honestly, that’s one of the reasons I thought the book might be boring.)
But those deep dive chapters on whales and whaling? I’m into them. They add to the intensity of the novel. The focus. The obsession. Maybe they even make the reader a little obsessed too.
Just goes to show - never take anyone else’s word for it.
Read it for yourself.
06.11.2025
Did I need another copy of Moby-Dick? No.
Did I go ahead and get one?
Of course I did.
So I met up with my reading buddy for coffee and chat about our reading journey through Moby Dick so far. We then visited a wonderful local bookstore when I discovered this copy:
The design reminded me of my twelve-year-old self. Full of possibility, adventure, and wild ideas. (My favorite thing, when I wasn’t running around outside with friends, was to disappear into my room and read for hours.
This copy also has my favorite quote on the back cover and the sweetest inscription on the inside.
(Yes, I realize it is one thing to own multiple translations of a book but quite another to own three copies of a book that is not translated... 😂)
05.17.2025
So I picked up the Norton Critical Edition of Moby Dick on Kindle for the notes (my paperback has none), and it delivered. For example, if you’ve read Moby-Dick, did you know Queequeg was inspired by a real person named Tupai Cupa? This is his self-portrait:
Endnotes for the win.
Just for fun:
To me, nothing screams “summer beach read” like a mass market paperback.
So the other weekend, I was having lunch with my mom and showed her my copy of Moby Dick with the gorgeous blue cover and whale on the front.
I said, "Doesn't this look like the quintessential beach read?"
And she replied, "Moby Dick I not a beach read. People do not read books like Moby Dick at the beach." 😂
"I know," I said. "But if you knew nothing about this novel at all and all you saw the mass market paperback with a gorgeous blue cover and a whale, wouldn't you think 'perfect beach read'?"
She just laughed and shook her head no.
Surely, someone, somewhere, has read Moby Dick on their beach vacation...
Quotes and Notes from Moby Dick:
Quotes:
The page numbers on these quotes are taken from the kindle edition: Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition (3rd edition)
"He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat." (p. 257)
"For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.” (p. 251)
"But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed." (p. 242)
"Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us." (p. 242)
"... And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked." (pp. 238-239)
"... and finally considering in what a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will." (p. 235)
"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own." (p. 234)
"Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region." (p. 47)
"Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever." (p. 47)
"For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger..." (p. 47).
"...but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." (p. 49).
"..the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose..." (p. 49)
"Ignorance is the parent of fear..." (p. 62)
"They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company." (p. 69)
"Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow." (p. 76)
“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul." (p. 82)
"You cannot hide the soul." (p. 86)
"He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself." (p. 86)
"I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy." (p. 87)
"...there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends." (p. 88)
"I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part." (p. 89)
"You cannot hide the soul." (p. 86)
"It is not down in any map; true places never are." (p. 90)
"... for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending." (p. 113)
"For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!" (p. 134)
"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death." (p. 148)
"Think not, is my eleventh commandment;12 and sleep when you can, is my twelfth..." (p. 149).
"No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It’s an honor; I consider it an honor." (pp. 151-152)
"There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable." (p. 172)
Notes:
Melville is a great writer in many ways. Check out this passage:
"..and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep." (p. 82)
The preacher is relaying the story of Jonah and the whale. He is comparing bleeding to death and sleep, but more than that, look at the alliteration that happens in this sentence. It is feels so musical, like poetry. I get the sense that this is a novel that to be read out loud.
Here is another example of that wonderful use of alliteration in the sentence:
"..and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him." (p. 82)
Melville has a passage in the book that I think sums up the whole book perfectly:
"He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge. Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals..." (pp. 200-201)