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    Moby Dick
    Moby Dick
    Moby Dick
    Audiobook (abridged)4 hours

    Moby Dick

    Written by Herman Melville

    Narrated by Bill Bailey

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    About this audiobook

    The Nantucket whaling ship, the Pequod, spirals the globe in search of Moby Dick, the mythical white whale of the Southern Oceans. Driven on by the obsessive revenge of Captain Ahab, the crew and the outcast Ishmael find themselves caught up in a demonic pursuit which leads inexorably to an apocalyptic climax.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJan 4, 1995
    ISBN9789629545567
    Author

    Herman Melville

    Herman Melville was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and poet. His most notable work, Moby Dick, is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

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    Reviews for Moby Dick

    4/5

    439 ratings221 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is it, folks--the Great American Novel. It doesn't get any better--or more experimental--than this.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      very good, very long

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      No one ever seems to discuss this, but there are parts of this exquisitely written tome that are hilarious!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The most beautiful modern edition of an undisputed masterpiece. Stranger, funnier, and more varied than I imagined, this edition literally stopped people on the street. A homeless man in San Francisco stopped and admired the book, smiling as he told me he "needed that".

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A review of Moby-Dick? Right. It's been around for 150 odd years. It'll be around for at least another 150 odd. For good reason. If Shakespeare wrote Genesis and the Book of Judges, this might be a nice approximation of how Melville writes. And that's how I would describe Moby-Dick.Other notes, pay attention to Ahab's speech patterns and his spiritual journey throughout Moby-Dick; you'd swear he was a maimed Hamlet.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      On my should read list list but avoided successfully for 45 years. Between the Philbrick recommendation and the lauds to Hootkins' narration, I finally succumbed and spent nearly a month of commutes taking the big story in, and the next month thinking about the story. SO glad I listened rather than skimmed as a reader. It has everything;. Agree with Floyd 3345 re fiction and nonfiction shelving

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      (Original Review, 1981-02-10)This is a book that knows how excessive it is being.It took me three times through it to realize that it's the greatest novel in the English language. Of course it has everything wrong with it: the digressions, the ludicrous attempt to out-Shakespeare Shakespeare, the prose through which a high wind blows perpetually, the fact that it's written almost entirely in superlatives . . . Never mind, it's overtopped by wave upon wave of genius, exuberant, explicative, mad in its quest to be about everything at once and to ring every bell in the English language. Yes it can be tough going sometimes, but here's an all-important hint: read this book aloud.Needless to say, it would never get across an editor's desk intact today. And today we're poorer for that. Something else: no one ever seems to mention how madly funny it is. It's vital to tune in to the humour, I think, if you are to enjoy reading it.“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” is a good book, but doesn't quite rank with Poe's best work, and the "Scarlet Letter" has always seemed to me so narrowly provincial in its concerns that I've never been tempted to read it. But "Moby-Dick" is something else. Strange, digressive, sprawling, experimental, playful... it's a book that takes chances - and sometimes falls flat on its face: for example, not all the digressions work and, as someone already mentioned, the attempts at Shakespearean language are often laughable. But in the end, I think it has to be recognised as a monumental effort.First encountered it at 19 as required reading and found the tale enjoyable but the digressions on whaling baffling and tedious. Some year’s later I am two-thirds of the way through re-reading it. It now seems as though the tale is the most minor and uninteresting part of it. The supposed digressions are the bulk of the work.It is beyond marvellous. The language rings with echoes of the Bible and Shakespeare but the high style is mingled with prose of such simple directness that it barely feels like a 19th century novel at all. For me, what rises endlessly from the pages is a sense of joy and wonder - the sheer joy of being alive and experiencing each moment as something new, and the profound wonder of man in the face of a natural world he may come close to conquering but will never fully understand.I still find myself struggling to get my head around what it all means and quite why it is so great. But great - immense, staggering, colossal - it surely is. A mighty work."Moby-Dick" will be the equivalent of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat at the gates of Heaven. If you liked it, you'll go straight through the gates. If you didn't, well....As a side note, whilst “Moby Dick” remains his towering achievement, works such as "Bartleby the Scrivener", "Billy Budd & Pierre", or "The Ambiguities" are all remarkable in their own ways, whilst utterly different. Alongside "Bartleby", though, for me, Melville's other astonishing achievement is "Confidence Man" - a breathtakingly modern, or perhaps better, "post-modern" book, almost entirely without precursor. Imagine a literary "F is for Fake", & you begin to get a tiny hint of what Melville is up to. Of all writers, he seems to me to be the one who, standing at the very cusp of that moment when literary form is about to find itself cast in stone, is able to invent, it seems as if with every work, a wholly new literary form in & for each of his works. In every sense of the word, his writing & his works are excessive, just as Faulkner's Willbe, & those of Gaddis, &, to an extent, Pynchon. This "excessiveness" is, for sure, a predominantly American phenomenon.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of my favorites! The opening paragraph pretty much sums up why I read it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This is a sea epic adventure story.If you didn't already know this book takes you on the journey of a sea voyage as told by our first person narrator Ishmael, who in boredom, decides to join the crew of a whaling ship called the Pequod. They then and bark on their journey off the coast of Nantucket and search of whales and most infamously the killer white well known to the sailors as Moby Dick. Crazy Captain Ahab seems not only dead set on evening the score with Moby Dick but in his obsession to do so leads the ship and its crew in to peril. Will Ishmael ever reach the shore again alive?Okay so I understand this is a classic, but my readers expect an honest review for me so here it goes...Though beautiful the writing is in this book, Herman Melville is extremely long-winded with his descriptions of pretty much everything. Every little detail takes an entire chapter to explain. The book becomes extremely tedious and even boring to those who aren't really keen on ocean epics. The language in which it is written is borderlined Old English and is beautiful to read. However as I said before the descriptions of things become monotonous with this author. I respect this for the classic that it is. But I'm sure this will probably be my one and only time reading this one. Now I can say that I have read it and move on. I would definitely recommend others to read it once and respect for the classic that it is as well. It is a good story overall, just difficult to read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Societally we all know the basic story. I learned a great deal about whaling, and the times.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Sublime. In this day and age it is awesome to slow down to the speed of this story and remember what it was like before the internet, before even radio, to be out upon the vast sea for years awhaling.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I listened to the unabridged text as an audiobook over a couple of months of long drives to and from work, and what struck me most was the structure of this huge book: the story of Ahab is essentially a short story which Melville has fragmented and embedded in thousands of tons of blubber! That is bold. I think it's also interesting that when this long text finally ends we're actually not quite half way through Melville's source--the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820. Within this context, Melville's colossal text is actually a truncated and abbreviated version of his primary source! Again, wild to think of it. Because I love to hear stories even more than to read them, because the rhythms have a physical presence when read aloud, I highly recommend the text as an audiobook. That Melville would devote an entire chapter to "The Blow Hole" is outrageous in many ways, but also an interesting listen. A friend told me her professor advised her class to "not wait for the whale" as they were reading the novel. That's hard advice to take. The book is definitely a unique experience.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A perfect novel. Pure genius.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Rated: AFascinating tale of the great white whale. Herman Melville develops complete context with enlightening descriptions of the whaling industry from ships to life on board to voyages to whaling to whales to the chase to the capture to the extraction of oils to life and death upon the sea. Oh, yes -- there is the story of Moby Dick.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Quite difficult to read - but enjoyable

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      In my view, America's greatest novel. Timeless, poetic and emblematic of a once great industry dominated by Americans.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The narration and voice acting in this is seriously impressive. I was shocked to discover that Bill Bailey is English; he is so convincing as an American, even as a New Englander I imagine.
      I found the book meandered at times. The pride of the whaler, in his virtue, his race, the details of his trade etc. It borders on grotesque at times but I take that to be the point. It does bring up themes of colonial ambition and human/racial superiority but again, these are themes to think on. I would’ve enjoyed more anecdotes and stories along the way, but it is still a worthy read.
    • 3/5
      Superbloat. Don't get memed into it. The upside isn't worth the downward swells.
    • 5/5
      To be honest about 1/3 of the book was engaging and the rest was hard to get through due to the knowledge dump of whale and whaling lore. There were points of incredible boredom BUT! I it captured the feeling of being o bored the whaling ship precisely. A lot of drag and tedious work but all of a sudden the actions on and you’re engaged! Narrator did a great job.
    • 2/5
      I've tried to finish this book at least four times and have gotten to just before the whale comes into the story (over a third, almost a half through) and given up. I like the protestant angle to this tale, but I have always found the overwhelming male vision hard to relate to as a reader, it just doesn't pull me in.
    • 3/5
      Call me Ishmael.

      So begins one of the so-called greatest American classics, Herman Melville's behemoth, Moby Dick. It is perhaps one of the most effective and simplest opening lines in literature, and as a writer, I’m jealous.

      I’ve read Melville before — Typee — which is a book where he discusses his time ship-wrecked on a small Polynesian island. The writing was antiquated and sounded like it came right out of a curio box, but I read on anyway. So I came to Moby Dick with the understanding that Melville was something of a nerd and loved the sea more than most men loved their children.

      The first 25% of Moby Dick read like a classic adventure tale. We had our protagonist, Ishmael, the tabula rasa to be written on by life’s experience. We had the wonderful Queequeg, experienced in the ways of whaling and a stick for all other men to measure themselves against. Queequeg is one of the best-written characters I’ve read in a long time because Ishmael regularly checks himself and his privilege when speaking of the harpooner, and it’s the two of them against the world.

      Ishmael and Queequeg are in love. I will die on that hill.

      But Lydia, I hear you protest, there’s no mention of ‘gay’ or anything of that sort in the book. Indeed, there is not. However, identifying as ‘gay’ wasn’t really a thing back then. There were gay / queer / homosexual acts but not necessarily people who identified as such. There were only relationships, and the two of them did indeed have a relationship.

      Where is the evidence? I hear, from the stands.

      Here, I present to you, my receipts.

      Ishmael and Queequeg spend the night together, sharing a bed because there is no more room at the inn.

      "Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.”

      Upon seeing Queequeg smoking his pipe by the fire:

      "I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.”

      "Our own hearts' honeymoon, a cosy, loving pair.”

      Along with a whole chapter dedicated entirely to how Queequeg holds him at night and keeps him warm and how delightful that is, I rest my case. Ishmael is as queer as the day is long.

      Unfortunately, in terms of positive representation, Queequeg is decidedly where it ends. Melville demonstrates the power of ignorance and stereotype and the effect it has on his writing with characters like Tashtego and Dagoo, First Nations and African respectively. Where Melville had experience with Polynesian people he created a fully-formed, interesting, compelling character. In others, where he had no experience, the characters are but hollow shells, racist and a product of their time.

      Racism and ignorance make your writing shit, Melville. This is why we need sensitivity readers and to research, to ask questions and most importantly for marginalised people to tell their own stories, with their own voices.

      I digress. On with the rest of the review.

      In order to teach a man how to sail, you must first teach him to long for the sea.

      Meville loves the sea, and that is clearly evident in some of the passages and paragraphs. His poetic love for the sea knows no bounds. I adored reading those passages because even when the sea was at its most destructive and totally wrought with a typhoon, the book was still such a beautiful read.

      "With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”

      "Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God’s throne.”

      I loved the sea as Herman did. I soaked it up. I could’ve read pages and pages and pages of him talking about the sea.

      As a writer, sometimes it is difficult to describe the same thing many times, because it can feel same-y, stale, but Melville’s writing never did.

      … until the whales.

      Melville needs a PhD in whales.

      The author describes whales in meticulous detail. Their types, their migration patterns, their size, how they swim, how they breed, their teeth, jaws, heads, foreheads, spines, flukes and tails. At length he describes them, adding footnotes to elaborate further. He mentions engravings, historical writings, papers, museums, paintings and other sculptures that feature whales as if he’s desperate to prove that he did the research and that his research matters. At times, while reading, I was like, Ahab isn’t the one obsessed with whales, Melville is.

      And then there’s the whaling.

      Once again, Melville describes in meticulous detail the technology, the ships and the weapons in order to go whaling.

      And you’d think that would be enough, but no. Melville continues to describe in detail, the slaughter, skinning and gathering of whale oil for chapter after chapter.

      I almost put down the book at a few points because I was so tired of Whale Facts (TM). I didn’t wanna go to whale school anymore.

      But then, like all great books, something compelling would happen in the next chapter and so I would read on.

      And, this is partly conformation bias speaking, but it was a good book.

      This book is biblical in all senses of the word. Its size is biblical, its scope is biblical, its characters are biblical.

      "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own."
    • 5/5
      It’s worth the time and all of the crazy whale minutiae Melville throws in. A biblical cautionary tale of human arrogance. And sometimes very funny. The narrator should either get a Nobel Prize or a Purple Heart. Now if I can only finish Ulysses my literary bucket list would be complete.
    • 2/5
      Overbearing and exhausting, such a shame because the beginning was amazing
    • 3/5
      This is a sea epic adventure story.If you didn't already know this book takes you on the journey of a sea voyage as told by our first person narrator Ishmael, who in boredom, decides to join the crew of a whaling ship called the Pequod. They then and bark on their journey off the coast of Nantucket and search of whales and most infamously the killer white well known to the sailors as Moby Dick. Crazy Captain Ahab seems not only dead set on evening the score with Moby Dick but in his obsession to do so leads the ship and its crew in to peril. Will Ishmael ever reach the shore again alive?Okay so I understand this is a classic, but my readers expect an honest review for me so here it goes...Though beautiful the writing is in this book, Herman Melville is extremely long-winded with his descriptions of pretty much everything. Every little detail takes an entire chapter to explain. The book becomes extremely tedious and even boring to those who aren't really keen on ocean epics. The language in which it is written is borderlined Old English and is beautiful to read. However as I said before the descriptions of things become monotonous with this author. I respect this for the classic that it is. But I'm sure this will probably be my one and only time reading this one. Now I can say that I have read it and move on. I would definitely recommend others to read it once and respect for the classic that it is as well. It is a good story overall, just difficult to read.
    • 5/5
      Brilliantly read by William Hootkins (not Bill Bailey). An amazing social commentary on life on a whaling ship in the mid 1800s, with pathos, humour and insight into the human soul. And of course lots and lots about whales.

      I have picked the book up several times in the past, but gave up every time. William Hootkins made the book come alive. Highly recommended.
    • 1/5
      Worst book ever
    • 4/5
      Did the author rely on a Thesaurus for much of the dialogue? I almost felt like he was trying to impress the readers with his use of bigger words than needed. I also didn’t like the great whale constantly referred to as a fish. That’s something George Costanza would be more likely to do than an expert on whaling. The narration was excellent and if it weren’t for the seafaring accent the book would have been a chore to read.
    • 5/5
      Read this in tandem w/ friends, a full spectrum of opinion was thus established. My friend Roger Baylor left an indelible smudge on his own critical reputation for his hapless remarks. I tended to the ecstatic edge of said continuum. I did find the novel's disparate elements an obstacle at times, but, then again, I had to temper my velocity anyway as it was a group read: there's been sufficient snark from my mates for a decade now about plowing through a selection in a weekend. There was such a foam of detail and philosophy. The terrors of thunder and the groan of salty timber abounded. The stale breath of morning would often freeze upon the very page. The majesty of Melville's prose was arresting, it held, bound -- it felt as if one's focus was being nailed to the mast like Ahab's gold. Moby Dick is such a robust tapestry, epic and yet filigreed with minor miracles and misdeeds.

      I do look forward to a reread.
    • 5/5
      The narrator is excellent, capturing the humor, satire, confusion, and tragedy in an engaging and accessible way.
    • 5/5
      This is the best book I've ever read. An amazing adventure. I couldn't believe what I was reading at times! The way the main character delivers his humor is just exquisite. I had to look up a lot of words, a lot of Biblical references, and a lot of American history to understand parts of the book, and that was a great educational experience.