Herman Melville - Moby-Dick V

"What kind of horrible, unreadable, nasty piece of trash is this and why do they make kids read this. I couldn't even get through the Cliff Notes it was that bad."


"I read this book as a challenge to myself. That is why I literally have no one to blame but myeslf.

I thought this would be interesting. I was wrong. This HAS to be THE most boring book EVER.

I waded through 300 hundred fricking pages of some of the most boring drivel ever created. Seriously Herman did you have to go to so much painstaking detail. After 100 pages I wouldn't have held it against you if you left one freaking detail as a mystery. But I persevered. Then when the whale finally shows it's big ass up, I get a page and a half of the whale kicking their asses. Seriously Herman? Seriously?

In conclusion this was a waste of time."


"Quite poorly written, it's read nowadays just to read it. Ahab turned his life into revenge. He could have chosen to get over it and live his life - instead, he devotes himself to a futile, desperate pursuit of revenge."


"Is there any chance that this book would get across an editor’s desk in its current state today? We think not — all the good stuff is buried under Melville’s endless self-indulgent verbiage. In our literary culture, the book has become a behemoth to slay in itself, and such a quest would obviously be cheapened by skipping all the bits about the specifics of whaling tools, but that said, wouldn’t it actually be a better book if those were left out?"


"Shouldn't be a classic. We all decided it was regardless of literary quality."


"I have to admit I hated this book too. I started calling it 'Everything you ever wanted to know about whaling and were afraid to ask' and then I didn’t finish it."


"Moby Dick is actually a bit of a joke in literary circles. It is poorly written, and it likely would not be published today if it weren’t for its reputation."


"When you have college professors telling you to skip chapters(which happened to me), then something is obviously not right. The story itself is definitely a classic, but it needed a good editor to strip out the chapters on whale biology and the entire chapter dedicated to his bowl of soup."