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    Moby Dick: Or the Whale
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    Moby Dick: Or the Whale
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    Moby Dick: Or the Whale
    Ebook825 pages12 hours

    Moby Dick: Or the Whale

    By Herman Melville

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    About this ebook

    Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title—offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.

    This edition of Moby-Dick includes a Foreword, Biographical Note, and Afterword by R.L. Fisher.

    When a wandering sailor looking to be hired onto a whaling ship finds himself on the Pequod, little does he know the dire fate that awaits him and his crewmates. For the ship's captain, Ahab, is slowly going insane. Having lost a leg in an ill-fated harpoon attack against a fearsome white whale many years before, Ahab vows his revenge against Moby Dick--a vow that has become Ahab's deadly obsession.

    After many months at sea, Moby Dick is spotted, and Ahab engages the crew in relentless pursuit. Ahab will stop at nothing to kill the beast...even if it means his own death--and the death of all his crew.

    Can Ahab be stopped before it is too late? Or will the Pequod--and all its crew--perish in the silent depths of the sea...?



    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 15, 1998
    ISBN9781466804128
    Author

    Herman Melville

    Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet who received wide acclaim for his earliest novels, such as Typee and Redburn, but fell into relative obscurity by the end of his life. Today, Melville is hailed as one of the definitive masters of world literature for novels including Moby Dick and Billy Budd, as well as for enduringly popular short stories such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Bell-Tower.

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    Reviews for Moby Dick

    4/5

    6,158 ratings205 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Read this out of a sense of duty, while recovering from surgery for a deviated septum, which required laying on my back for a week. I thought it was pretty good.
    • 5/5
      The most beautiful modern edition of an undisputed masterpiece. Stranger, funnier, and more varied than I imagined, this edition literally stopped people on the street. A homeless man in San Francisco stopped and admired the book, smiling as he told me he "needed that".
    • 5/5
      On my should read list list but avoided successfully for 45 years. Between the Philbrick recommendation and the lauds to Hootkins' narration, I finally succumbed and spent nearly a month of commutes taking the big story in, and the next month thinking about the story. SO glad I listened rather than skimmed as a reader. It has everything;. Agree with Floyd 3345 re fiction and nonfiction shelving
    • 5/5
      Read this in tandem w/ friends, a full spectrum of opinion was thus established. My friend Roger Baylor left an indelible smudge on his own critical reputation for his hapless remarks. I tended to the ecstatic edge of said continuum. I did find the novel's disparate elements an obstacle at times, but, then again, I had to temper my velocity anyway as it was a group read: there's been sufficient snark from my mates for a decade now about plowing through a selection in a weekend. There was such a foam of detail and philosophy. The terrors of thunder and the groan of salty timber abounded. The stale breath of morning would often freeze upon the very page. The majesty of Melville's prose was arresting, it held, bound -- it felt as if one's focus was being nailed to the mast like Ahab's gold. Moby Dick is such a robust tapestry, epic and yet filigreed with minor miracles and misdeeds.

      I do look forward to a reread.
    • 5/5
      No one ever seems to discuss this, but there are parts of this exquisitely written tome that are hilarious!
    • 5/5
      very good, very long
    • 1/5
      Worst book ever
    • 4/5
      Quite difficult to read - but enjoyable
    • 4/5
      A good story shouldn't take that long to tell.
    • 5/5
      A perfect novel. Pure genius.
    • 5/5
      This is it, folks--the Great American Novel. It doesn't get any better--or more experimental--than this.
    • 5/5
      In my view, America's greatest novel. Timeless, poetic and emblematic of a once great industry dominated by Americans.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorites! The opening paragraph pretty much sums up why I read it.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the unabridged text as an audiobook over a couple of months of long drives to and from work, and what struck me most was the structure of this huge book: the story of Ahab is essentially a short story which Melville has fragmented and embedded in thousands of tons of blubber! That is bold. I think it's also interesting that when this long text finally ends we're actually not quite half way through Melville's source--the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820. Within this context, Melville's colossal text is actually a truncated and abbreviated version of his primary source! Again, wild to think of it. Because I love to hear stories even more than to read them, because the rhythms have a physical presence when read aloud, I highly recommend the text as an audiobook. That Melville would devote an entire chapter to "The Blow Hole" is outrageous in many ways, but also an interesting listen. A friend told me her professor advised her class to "not wait for the whale" as they were reading the novel. That's hard advice to take. The book is definitely a unique experience.
    • 3/5
      Societally we all know the basic story. I learned a great deal about whaling, and the times.
    • 3/5
      This is a sea epic adventure story.If you didn't already know this book takes you on the journey of a sea voyage as told by our first person narrator Ishmael, who in boredom, decides to join the crew of a whaling ship called the Pequod. They then and bark on their journey off the coast of Nantucket and search of whales and most infamously the killer white well known to the sailors as Moby Dick. Crazy Captain Ahab seems not only dead set on evening the score with Moby Dick but in his obsession to do so leads the ship and its crew in to peril. Will Ishmael ever reach the shore again alive?Okay so I understand this is a classic, but my readers expect an honest review for me so here it goes...Though beautiful the writing is in this book, Herman Melville is extremely long-winded with his descriptions of pretty much everything. Every little detail takes an entire chapter to explain. The book becomes extremely tedious and even boring to those who aren't really keen on ocean epics. The language in which it is written is borderlined Old English and is beautiful to read. However as I said before the descriptions of things become monotonous with this author. I respect this for the classic that it is. But I'm sure this will probably be my one and only time reading this one. Now I can say that I have read it and move on. I would definitely recommend others to read it once and respect for the classic that it is as well. It is a good story overall, just difficult to read.
    • 1/5
      This could have been a shorter book. Melville created multiple chapters explaining and discussing the sperm whale’s head, right whale’s head, different kinds of whale and their classifications. It was like reading an encyclopedia rather than a story.
    • 5/5
      Sublime. In this day and age it is awesome to slow down to the speed of this story and remember what it was like before the internet, before even radio, to be out upon the vast sea for years awhaling.
    • 2/5
      My edition had 620 pages. Melville could have told the story in 200, and it would have been a much more enjoyable read. Some folks have accused current generations of having attention deficits due to the snappy editing in TV and movies. We have nothing on Melville, though. Moby Dick is a disjointed and schizophrenic jumble of almost nonexistent plot development, thin character development, solipsistic ramblings, anecdotes, and whaling "lessons".

      I read this book because my copy was a 13th birthday gift given to my grandfather and because it's supposedly a classic. I was throughly disappointed and left wondering what's so classic about it. My grandfather probably liked it, though. He liked the works of James Michener, possibly the most boring writer to ever put ink to paper.

      Kahn was a better Ahab, and Wrath of Kahn was a better Moby Dick. Perhaps Nicholas Myers a better author than Herman Melville.
    • 3/5
      It took me three weeks, but I finished it.

      Oh my... I don't know if I hated it or didn't mind it (certainly didn't love it). It was a chore to read, and reading shouldn't feel that way. I'm glad I got through it, but again I don't think that should be the aim of reading! I can see why it's so lauded, but at the same time I don't believe that something is good just because it is verbose and tome-like. The story was good, but the characters were very underdeveloped. I'd have loved to have known more about their individual stories (especially poor Pip, and Queegueg). I did warm to the chapter upon chapter of whale facts* a little, but I felt they were self indulgent and didn't really add as much to the story as they would have if they were trimmed down a bit to make room for more actual story. At times the prose was beautiful, but at others I found myself reading pages without absorbing a thing. It's an incredible piece of work...but not a great reading experience.

      *after at first Googling whether you could skip those and still follow the book...
    • 3/5
      I finally got around to reading this book. The book was a little hard to read due to the more complicated sentence structure used in 1851 when it was published. The book had a lot of potential, but the story was diluted down by all the information on whales. The info was interesting, however, it distracted the reader from the story. I found it odd how one chapter would be "normal" writing, then the next would be older style English, which I didn't like to read. The book could have easily been trimmed by 200 pages and much more character dialogue added to build the story.
    • 3/5
      Moby Dick is worth reading, despite being pretty abominable philosophically (and parts of it are seemingly interminable and hard to get through, but I think that's actually a deliberate aesthetic choice on Melville's part). There are parts that are very good. The opening chapters about the friendship that develops between Ishmael and Queequeg are actually quite entertaining, and Melville makes some insightful psychological points through the character of Ahab. There are a lot of sort of proto-postmodernist elements in terms of the novel's form, along with Melville's belief in man's impotence in both thought and action which they represent---but nowhere near to the extent that would come later, in, for example, Ulysses.
    • 1/5
      DNF!(Did NOT Finish!) Tried to read this in 2010. Edition I had was over 500 pages. Got to page 175, and couldn't take anymore! I know it's considered a classic for the themes it represents, but I just couldn't get through it. Just not my cup of tea. I read for sweeping adventure, sci-fi, fantasy, let me escape stuff. Waaay to much descriptive style here for me. If there was an abridged version, with just the adventure parts, I would read it. But that would only be about 50 pages...I know. At least I tried...
    • 4/5
      I listened to the free Librivox recording of the book. The reader did an excellent job.
    • 4/5
      People have said that Moby Dick is an American classic - the ultimate American novel. I've also heard that it is long and tedious and rambles on about things that are only vaguely related to the plot. After finishing this book, I felt that it was a combination of both - a great American epic that depicts the story of a man obsessed with killing a white whale and, at the same time, one of those classics that goes off topic for chapters at a time. I read this book gradually in both audio and print over several weeks, reading bits in between some of my other books. I found myself drawn to it more and more and even talking to others about the book. The descriptions of whaling in the 19th century are fascinating. I thought I would be completely disgusted by the hunting and killing of such a noble animal, but instead, I thought the graphic descriptions of the dangerous lives of the whalers was really impressive and I found myself sharing these stories with my family. Yes, there were chapters (especially the infamous White chapter) that I would finish and not have any idea what was the purpose or benefit of the chapter, but overall, I really enjoyed this book. It is definitely the type of book I would want to visit again, this time trying to understand all the Biblical and mythological references. Definitley deserves to be read by everyone.
    • 1/5
      Too many details about the ships!
    • 4/5
      A bit dated, but great nonetheless.
    • 3/5
      One if not THE greatest American Novel.
    • 4/5
      This is a very challenging book to read, even for a 5th grader like me. I recommend this book to 6th graders, and up, but maybe some 5th graders my age can read it. Even though the language was confusing and there was some minor killing, I have to say the book was awesome.
    • 4/5
      One of those books that I'm surprised I never read in high school or college. I have to admit that this being the first time I've read this I know I've missed many layers to truly appreciate the depth of this book. I plan on reading this again next year to get a sense of some of those missed areas. And it will most likely take another reading after that to truly grasp it. So for now four out of five stars.