“The pleasures of Moby Dick are more akin to the pleasures of a police procedural like CSI or NYPD Blue,” writes author and scholar Jonathan Rogers. “A better comparison, really, would be the Horatio Hornblower books or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series.”
He says Moby Dick is a book about whaling, which is the reason there are so many details about whaling in it. He notes, “The piled-on detail seems oppressive to many readers; it truly is hard to handle. But the story begins to do its work on you when you stop trying to handle it.”
Moby Dick by ~scumbugg on deviantART
I wonder if that book works better for actual whalers.
A woman on Twitter told me she and her young son loved it, reading it at bedtime every night.
I love the book too. I think that author gets to the point just fine at the end: all the sublime things are there, but just because there are there in our world. The Biblical images make sense in the story, for the same reason the Bible makes sense in real life. It’s a big enough story to speak on the same terms as life.