I’ve read this damn book twenty-two times, Charlie, and I still don’t understand a thing…
Yup, I thought about mentioning that, but decided that on some level, to the Melville specialist I imagine, it must relate in some way. (Don’t ask me, I’m not a Melville specialist.)
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It’s like proto-kafka.
And didn’t he write “Wakefield” too? Also pretty Kafkaesque. Or was that Hawthorne? (Too tired to look it up.)
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I’m just impressed that you were able to make it to the end of the post. I can’t even read about reading Moby Dick without zoning out…
Read the former and the latter, but I couldn’t get enjoyment out of the Russian authors. Anna Karenina, The Idiot, War and Peace - I just couldn’t get interested to keep reading. I am an inadequate reader, I guess.
The Silmarillion was fun for several hundred pages, but then suddenly bored me out. Moby Dick, however - read it as a teenager, re-read it as a young man, and tried to re-read it just a few years ago. A new book, every time. The last read was botched by to much on my plate, so I switched to an unabridged recording. I always fell asleep listening to that in bed, and I don’t know if I actually finished the book. 
I would prefer not to.
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If it’s any consolation, hardly anyone was successful reading “Moby Dick” in Melville’s own lifetime - he only sold about 3,200 copies of the book while he was alive, and died relatively unknown. It took a solid decade of introspective analysis by respected critics in the 1920’s for the public to finally go “hey, that book is actually pretty good.”
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