Moby-Dick

⚖The case for it

The scene where Ahab nails a gold coin to the mast and talks a crew into his private war is the book in miniature, a study of one obsessive will bending ordinary men. Around it the registers swing exactly as one reader catalogs: "the writing is by turns ironic, serious, violent, and tender." Father Mapple's sermon stands alone as oratory; the Grand Armada chapter, whales nursing calves in calm water under the boats, is as tender a thing as Melville wrote; and "the heart-breaking acquiescence of Starbuck" gives the book its moral argument. What carries it all is "Melville's exuberant love of language," sentences reread purely for rhythm.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

"I would rather be harpooned than read this book ever again." By one reader's arithmetic, "85% of this book is various lessons on whaling," rope history, species taxonomy, an essay on the color white, delivered while the story you were promised idles offstage. "The whole middle of this book is pretty much a wash," another concludes, and teachers quietly agree, assigning students to skip entire chapters that nobody reports missing. The diction runs archaic, the sentences long enough to lose their subject en route to the verb, and the loving documentation of rendering down living whales turns stomachs the book never checks on. "Repetitive, expressionless and soul destroying": an adventure novella buried under the blubber.

— the honest librarian

13h

honest hours

19

sittings