 Alright, let's talk about Moby Dick. Earlier this year I started doing a filler of non-sci-fi books every month, and I wanted to continue doing that, and I thought, you know, I've read Moby Dick, so I'll do an episode about Moby Dick. The first thing that people ask me when I tell them that I've read Moby Dick, they say, did you really read Moby Dick? And yes, I read Moby Dick. Three years. It took me three years to do it. I stopped for a long time, but it was a really long read, not a comfortable read. You have to pick through it. But anyway, here's the short description of the book. Everybody really knows what the story is. There's a young man who's the narrator of the book. He calls himself Ishmael. We don't know what his real name is. In fact, that's the first line of the book. It says, call me Ishmael. It's an Old Testament Bible reference. It's the first son of Abraham. It's a reference to a lost son or an errant son or whatever. You can look that up yourself. I'll let other people talk about Bible stuff. He arrives in Nantucket determined to sign on aboard a whaling ship just for the adventure of experiencing whaling, which is what the author Herman Melville himself did. Unfortunately, Ishmael signs on aboard a ship called the Pequod that was run by an obsessed lunatic named Captain Ahab, whose only reason for whaling is to find and kill a giant white sperm whale in the South Pacific named Moby Dick, because earlier in his life that whale bit one of his legs off. Ahab has a peg leg because of it. And the book ends, I really can't spoil it for anybody because this is the part that everybody knows. You find the whale, the whale sinks the boat and kills everybody at the end. When you come down to it, it really is that simple. This book is considered one of the great works of American literature. When it was released, it was a flop. Melville was a successful and well-known author and everyone was eagerly awaiting his next book and he released Moby Dick and everyone was like, what the hell is this? It was 1851, I think. He lived 40 more years and I read that the book sold a total of 300 copies throughout his entire lifetime. That's a flop. It was only in the 20th century that people considered it one of the great works of modern literature. There are many interpretations of the book. There are many things to say about the content of the book. All I can really tell you is my experience of reading the book. And starting out, the first third of the book or so, maybe the first 20% or so, was amazing. Some of the best writing I've ever read. Melville has a lot of things to say about life, about the world, about religion, about atheism, about what you should expect from the universe, that the universe and that God or whatever is completely passionless when it comes to your life and you're making a mistake if you expect anything from it. And that's Ishmael's approach to life. He just wants to experience things. Ahab is the opposite. He demands this one particular thing from the world and he dooms himself on everybody because of it. But after the first third of the book or so, it starts to get long-winded. It starts to ramble. I mean really starts to ramble. By the end of the book, and there's 133 chapters, I think, by the end of the book, there are chapters, chapter after chapter, that are only a few pages long, two, three pages long. There's a chapter that lists every kind of known whale and how to identify them. There's a chapter that talks in great detail about how the steel tips of whaling harpoons are forged. There's a chapter about how the food aboard ship is made and how the cooks do all of it. There's a chapter about how wooden barrels are made and the metal hoops that are forged. It really gets tiresome. And then the story that we all know about the white whale sinking the boat and killing everybody, all of that happens in like the last five pages of the book. And I'm hardly exaggerating. When you come to the end of the book and you're turning the pages and you see how few pages are left, you're thinking, how is Millville going to end this great story? So quickly. And then bang, bang, bang. He does it. It's over. The writing at the end of the book I didn't think was all that great compared to the writing at the beginning of the book, which was beautiful, which was tremendous. And I recommend reading the beginning of the book at least just for the experience of reading that great writing. The primary reason I wanted to go through the experience of reading the book was because I wanted to see how Millville wrote this particular scene at the end. Here's a clip from the Gregory Peck movie from 1956. You see, he actually climbs onto the back of the whale and then delivers the line about, from hell's heart, I stab at thee. Yes, Star Trek II, the Wrath of Khan, took that line from Moby Dick. And then there's the scene with Ahab's dead body lashed to the back of the whale in the tangle of whaling ropes with his arm flopping back and forth. I wanted to see how Millville wrote that scene because I thought it was really beautiful. The scene is not in the book. It doesn't happen in the book. That was an invention of the filmmakers and it was great. They did a great thing there. It's not in the book, which was disappointing. I'm glad I read the thing. I can tell people that I read it and I can tell people what I told you just now. So there you have it. My experience with Moby Dick. Please remember to press that like button. It helps my videos get seen. And then subscribe so you can come back next time. I do science fiction, book, TV and movie reviews all the time. And please consider becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below.