A magnificent book. It's about so much more than just a whale and a captain. It's an encyclopedia of whaling. The story is told in such beautiful prose that many times I found it hard to believe that an actual person wrote it. The only challenge is the very complex writing structure. I've never seen so many semicolons.

I own the Penguin published version of this book as well as the Kindle "Penguin" version. While MOST of Melville's "Leviathanic" work is here, there are some serious omissions and problems with the Kindle version of this publication. Here they are, in the order they occur to me as I write this:

1. There is no cover art
2. There are none of the very useful diagrams and drawings present at the back of the actual Penguin publication
3. There is no table of contents (This is VERY annoying in a book that begs frequent reference to various chapters, especially one already divided into 100+ chapters)
4. None of the textual emendations are enumerated
5. There are MANY textual mistakes, including wrong words, repeated words and other typos
6. The glossary from the Penguin edition has been eliminated and the Kindle stock "OAD" Dictionary is nearly worthless
7. The explanatory notes from the Penguin publication has been omitted (especially vexing given the hypertext possibilities of the Kindle)

Whether this is your first time with this seminal work, or you just want an electronic copy for your portable library, I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS RENDERING. Overall the Digireads "Penguin" version feels as though it was carelessly rushed into being.

Moby Dick is a classic....a book that you'd have to have lived in a cave on a remote island for your entire life to have not at least heard the name of.

The book has sat on my bookshelf, as part of a series of classic novels I had been given, for some time now. I always knew that 'someday' I'd open it and read it...being one of those 'I really should read it at some point' books.

Apparently I enjoyed this book a lot less than many others who have read it and reviewed it here....because I have to admit that it is one of the most dry, turgid, tedious experiences I have ever had to wade through this book, and it's under 500 pages long.

Perhaps what deterred me from enjoying it was the endless chapters that provide detailed descriptions of the size of a whale's head....or the length of a whale's tail....or the distance from a whale's head to its tail.....chapter upon chapter upon chapter that did nothing to move the story along, did nothing to flesh out the characters any better..and did nothing to hold my interest.

While the book is filled with interesting characters, the infamous Captain Ahab, the strange and curious Queequeg, the immortal 'Ishmael' who provides the narrative of the story, and who seemed, upon reading his story of life upon the Pequod, more like a clumsy, giddy little schoolgirl working on a fishing boat than an 'able bodied seaman'.

The cast of characters alone could have been far more interesting, at least to me, to explore than the wrapt appraisal of a whale's jawbone....and left me feeling as though I was reading a non-fiction work entitled 'Everything you'll never need to know about whales'.

'Call me Ishmael' may start off what for some is their favorite written work of all time. Call ME bored.....and unable to really recommend this to anyone other than someone who for some reason really desires to know more about the anatomy of a whale.