Thinking of reading this. What should I expect?

First chapter blows your top off. Rest is good but didnt hit the same strength for me

Unironically name one

It's very good, albeit meandering. It paints a very broad picture of the era and is thematically similar to Paradise Lost. It's also very dense and not a page turner by any stretch. People that read it and say, "Oh, I liked it," didn't get it.

>Not loving Enter Ahab; To Him Stubb.
Pleb

101 whale facts

I started this week! 1/3 of the way through it. Enthralling, great prose I wish I could write out on command. No. And what is there is interesting read. People who complain about it are brainlets who can’t even finish a New Yorker article.

>What should I expect?
Perhaps the mobiest dick of American literature

Many of those 'whaling non-fiction' chapters are deeply important to the many points Melville is trying to make. Ch. 89 Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish is a good example. If you go into the book assuming it's full of pointless bullshit, that's what you'll find.

What would be the best edition? Annotated/Non-annotated? Illustrated/Non-illustrated?

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A tremendous novel.
I didn’t expect it to be as funny and endearing as it wound up being, but it really is a charming book in addition to all the weighty stuff.

northwestern press, the clothbound or the 20th anniversary.

exactly this

journey into the heart of america

The Lee Shore, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish and The Castaway made me blow my load when I read them.

I expected it to be \m/ blood and thunder, etc., but it's really mostly charming 19th century liberalism

You will love it if you get boners from whales

I was memed into believing there was more whale bio stuff and was slightly disappointed after reading it

Maybe in an abridged version.

Heard good things about the norton critical, but I went with a free file from project guttenbird.

>As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

The last chapters are literally the best ones. 130 to the end is the best of everything.

I read it in it's entirety once. I couldn't stand it. The more it went on, the more that I felt it began to lose the touch that the opening chapters had.

I tried to read it again this past year, and I couldn't stomach more than a couple hundred pages

Incredible

god I have to reread this. Just unbelievable

Melville is the American goat.

Whale biology, whaling history and naked men spooning no homo

Don’t speak to me about blasphemy boy, I’d slap the sun if he insulted me.

May be reciting that quote wrong but it might be my favorite line in any book I’ve ever read. Really fantastic experience.

I've read that passage about a dozen times over. The Quarter-Deck's probably one of my favourite chapters of pretty much any book.

This is awful, please someone tell me this isn't actually a sentence from the book..?

gay sex