What an epic and unrivalled monumental volume! Moby Dick is about a whaling vessel, the Pequod, that sets sail across the Pacific intent on finding the rumoured white whale, Moby Dick. Headed by the crazed Captain Ahab who lost his leg to the beast on a previous voyage and now intent on exacting his revenge, this woeful tale is told through the perspective of, Ishmael one of the sailors aboard the Pequod.

This book is so extremely exhaustive in the pains it takes to chronicle the significance of every last part of the anatomy of the various species of whale and even certain mechanisms of the ship that even the narrator acknowledges this to be so.

The lengthily drawn out and far too numerous chapters about all there is to know about Cetology frequently interrupted the actual telling of the story, thereby making it extremely hard to read i.e. whole entire chapters dedicated to whale lines or whaling terminology (such as 'gam') or the anatomy of a whale's tail.

The utter lack of storytelling meant that it ended far too abruptly for me. Also, the writing at times seemed like a dramatisation, with various crew members soliloquising or philosophising, which would therefore indicate that Ishmael is some omnipotent narrator? This dramatisation, while it did offer potent bits of characterisation shows structural inconsistencies in the writing.