/lit/ - Literature

I've read hundreds of books and this is the ONLY American book worth reading.

Prove me wrong.

Protip: you can't

Which one of Melville's other books is most similar to Moby Dick?

What is the best edition of Moby Dick?

What is the best edition of Moby Dick?

Moby Dick was, by far, the dumbest, most boring, idiotic book I've everread. I hated it. It's still on the top of books I absolutely despise.
First, there's about enough story for 100 pages, tops. The rest of the book is filled with unimportant side elements that don't move the story and don't provide any real character development, or are really very interesting. For the unabridged version, that meant that there was about 500 pages of unnecessary crap.
Second, the characters are so one dimensional that I kept forgetting who was who. Ahab is a very bitter old man. Moby is a beast and Ahab hates him because he's a bitter old man. The narrator is just a guy who's out on a boat for the first time. That's it. Nothing else. This could have been a short story and lost nothing. In fact it would have gained so much by losing so much of the unnecessary waste. I've seen the Patrick Stewart version and it's quite good. It makes the point of the story quite well and there's so little story in the book that it actually fits quite well into a miniseries.
Third, and this is the thing that still makes me cringe at the book, is all that fucking commentary and instruction on 18th century whaling techniques. Oh My God I hated those while I was reading it. I'd start a new chapter and Melville would go off on rope or some wheel or some other trinket that is so minimally related to the setting. It's supposed to be a story for god's sake, not a documentary on the 50 different types of knots that are used to do all the meaningless tasks on a whaling ship. I DON'T CARE!! GET TO THE FUCKING STORY!! It's a boat that hunts whales. That's all the detail I need. After the first 200 pages or so I started skipping whole chapters whenever the first paragraph was introducing some bit of irrelevant trivia.
I learned so much by reading this book. I learned that an unabridged version isn't always a better option. I also learned that just because a book is a "classic" doesn't mean it's actually good. I also learned that sometimes it's better to just get the movie.