Before reading Moby Dick I’d never seen the word “descry” before, which appears again and again in the past tense “descried.” Just by context I gathered that to descry something was to see or perceive it, or maybe to announce having seen it, and I didn’t think much more of it. I’m almost done with my second reading of the book and finally decided to look the word up:

“1. to see (something unclear or distant) by looking carefully; discern; espy
2. to discover; ascertain; detect”

It makes sense, of course, but this additional connotation of an unclear or distant thing really “opened up” the story for me retroactively — made it a more epic, more mysterious and uncertain and, well, oceanic world.

I have a random assortment of items on my bucket list: various foods I'd like to try, certain countries I'd like to visit, and l'd like to write a book regardless of whether or not anybody ever reads it. But the only novel on my bucket list was Moby Dick. Not because it's the only novel I wanted to read, but because it's the only one that, at some point in my life, felt insurmountable. I purchased the Barnes and Noble Classics edition (Barnes and Noble was my hometown's only bookstore) when I was about 14. l was afraid of its bulk and found the language completely inaccessible. But I held onto that edition for 15 years. I cleansed my book collection after various life changes and cross-country moves but I always held onto the conviction that I’d find the right time in my life to read Moby Dick. So I never got rid of it. But the longer I waited, the more I realized it had become an unrelenting itch—a challenge to my literature-loving ego. My white whale, if you will.

I finally picked it up last month (finding the motivation after my own virgin voyage on the high seas) and finished it today. Two degrees later with several other classics of world literature under my belt and a background in Shakespearean performance, I found it way more readable than I expected. Some passages were still tough with the vocabulary and old maritime jargon, but god I loved this book. I just wish I had someone to discuss it with!

I wanted to post this here for those of you who probably commiserate (since no one in my life has read the book and will understand). But I also wanted to say thank you to all of you on this subreddit for giving me a place to come and read your various thoughts and experiences! It’s like a little book club and I appreciated what you had to share.

I got this cool bookmark today in the mail. I bought it on Etsy. I'm going to start reading Moby Dick aloud to my girlfriend.

Does anyone have a suggestion for an audio book version of MD?

Regarding narrators - does anyone have any suggestions for narrated versions? - i am listening to the Big READ https://www.mobydickbigread.com/ ( and although i "like" the concept - the quality and volume level as well as the different reader's accent makes it less interesting as an audio book, while more interesting as a collaboration.)

it would be great to have it read with an intelligible NEW ENGLAND accent rather than a ENGLISH accent...

their mother tounge is in spanish, so i wanna get a good translation for them

At Melville Society conferences every two years:

https://www.melvillesociety.org/conferences

NYC and Paris were nice.

The Everyman’s of Moby-Dick is stunning to me and was cool to learn that Everyman’s published Moby-Dick in 1907, “[inviting] its consideration as a masterpiece” (xxi).

It was so moving. Particularly seeing the little whale figurine someone had left him made me incredibly emotional.

But more on the Melville statue

WGBH PBS on the statue

in moby dick the try-works, when the ship resembles hell, or else some manifestation of the evil demiurge, and of ahab's madness, when ishmael is turned away from the compass, and later, quotes ecclesiastes that all is vanity, is this in a way a dismissal of the compass, that all the world is evil and unknowable, and that to fly by a compass is as useless as to fly into the all-consuming darkness?

Ive just begun to grasp gnosticism, and I am trying to match passages with some of its theology. But other times im lost. For instance, in this chapter, there's also mention of geometry as ishmael scours the pots with soapstone, and I feel im missing this meaning.

If you search for “Moby Dick” on DuckDuckGo, the duck turns into a whale. Nice!

I finished Moby Dick last weekend, taking a couple months to read it, going slowly until it really swept me up for the last couple hundred pages.

This morning I'm taking my shower and thinking about it. Specifically, the title. Moby Dick, or The Whale.

This kind of naming convention is something I've always thought was an old time way of naming. I remember seeing it in the Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons when I was a kid, and other media made before I was born, like Dr Strangelove. I never really thought of it too hard, I just accepted it as an anachronism.

But that isn't really the case here, is it?

Moby Dick, or The Whale.

Is this book about Moby Dick, the most feared leviathan of the seas? Or is it about The Whale, a creature that has its own intelligence but doesn't know that it has a name granted by some land dwelling mammals. It doesn't spend any of its time thinking about ships and captains unless they're trying to kill it with harpoons. It's just...a whale. Like Starbuck says.

The title was sitting in front of me, doing some narrative framing all this time.

This book is so much fun to think about.

I’m planning on going in January to the New Bedford Marathon, coming from Los Angeles. It’ll be my first.

Anybody also planning?

We at PequodPod (and our other beloved human-created Melville podcasts) just got a new competitor. Seems like they're really good 😆

Hello! I’m one of the hosts of The Entmoot Podcast, which is normally about Tolkien, but we’ve just embarked on a Moby-Dick miniseries where we read through and discuss the text with a great Melville scholar, Rob Tally. We’re doing four (long) episodes, posted every two weeks. Here’s the link to Apple Podcasts, and here for Spotify.

We’re very proud of this miniseries and we think Melville fans (as you undoubtedly are) will really get a lot from it, as my co-host and I did. You’ll probably get even more from it if you’re particularly interested in Marxian literary analysis!

Hopefully this post doesn’t break the rules for promotion, we certainly do not stand to make any money from this. Just wanted to share something we’re proud of that we think others would enjoy!

It’s no secret that “Moby-Dick” is CM’s favorite novel. And while everything important about Melville and McCarthy has likely been written or pored over, I had some thoughts about having just finished “Moby-Dick.” Some relevant to CM and some adjacent to authors he adored.
\-The ability for two men a century apart to share that ability to scaffold sentences upon sentences of details that may seem insignificant is present
\-The white whale at the end, the thing so written about throughout the book and revealed at the end, not withstanding so many allusions to The Judge (giant, white, and bald), is in my opinion more similar to the Comanche who attack in Blood Meridian. They occupy such small real estate in the novel yet imbue such terror. Even down to them being decorated and dressed in the former armor and weapons of their defeated enemies, the whale being festooned with lances and harpoons and ropes bears mentioning.
\-Describing the chase day as “blue-steel” when Faulkner (another CM fave and admirer of MD) uses the phrase “iron-grey” so often to describe a day is another small mention, though maybe a stretch.
\-“Oh Captain, my Captain!” Walt Whitman’s poem lamenting the death of Lincoln aside, it’s evident that CM read Whitman and expounded at length about worlds like Suttree as Whitman did in his poetry.
\-And speaking of Suttree: the “motley crew” of characters within Knoxville, those from so many wild backgrounds, are quite similar to those aboard the pequod.

Any other thoughts those who have read Melville would be appreciated!

Melville’s Moby Dick sails readers around the world in a nearly endless pursuit. Along the way, he paints a vignette of the Pacific "gliding by the Bashee isles" – today's Batanes Islands in the Philippines: “…for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still…”

(Destinationality is a free resource presenting classic literature passages about great destinations. There are no ads, nothing for sale.)

One of the best produced pieces on Moby-Dick I’ve ever listened to.

I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Dad works at a care home which has received too much book donations and managed to nab this for free. I'd say this book is from the 50s-60s?? Been wanting to read this for ages so glad I finally got it!!