Hello it is Tuesday and it is time for
the Quiet as Mouse Book Club again.
This week I am reviewing Moby Dick
by Herman Melville.
I haven’t put up a video for a week
Yeah, last week was just a bad week
I didn’t do any filming
This week is better
So Moby Dick is an 1851 novel.
It is narrated by Ishmael
He is a sailor who goes on a whaling voyage
Led by Captain Ahab who is obsessed with getting revenge
On a particular white whale called Moby Dick,
Who took his leg on a previous voyage.
This is a book that I have been meaning to
read for a while
But have struggled to find the time for.
At the end of 2013 I watched a BBC TV film
called The Whale
Which is about the real life Essex incident,
When a whaler from Nantucket is attacked
And sunk by a whale in 1820
This is also the story that Moby Dick is based
on
So I was interested in reading this far more
famous interpretation of the events
But I enjoyed the BBC show and I would recommend
looking it up
It starred Martin Sheen and Jonas Armstrong,
and John Boyega as well, fact fans.
Anyway, book review. This book is quite long
It has 135 chapters
What I find most interesting perhaps is the amount of different styles used to tell the story,
Something I have not come across to such an
extent before.
There is normal prose
There are essays about whales, whale hunting,
Whale taxonomy,
Life on board a ship
It becomes a bit of an encyclopaedia occasionally.
And there is also like Shakespearean soliloquies
And asides, and stage directions,
Which are my favourite
It makes the book a very curious read,
In a good way, I think
I would say that the essays get a little tedious
at times
I am all for a good essay,
and some of them were very interesting
And were useful to the understanding of the
plot
And gave interesting allusions and metaphors
But my attention did wander quite a bit
Just the balance was a little bit off for me.
But on the plus side I now know more about
whales than I ever thought I would.
The first 100 odd pages and the last 100 odd pages 
were my favourites in the book.
The middle part was the bit where most of the
attention wandering happened.
The beginning before Ishmail gets on the ship was my favourite part of the book,
And the end, the bit that the book has been building up
to for so long
Where we have the battle between the whale
and the ship reaching its fatal conclusion
Was very exciting and well done.
Captain Ahab is a pretty fascinating character,
Mysterious and terrifying and uncompromising
And his story very much upstages Ishmael’s
story.
This is probably a book to read more than
once
There is so much symbolism and so many allegories that I definitely haven’t picked up first time round.
Having said that I don’t think that I am
going to be reading it again any time soon,
Because I just didn’t enjoy reading it enough
I didn’t get lost in the book
I wasn’t invested enough in the characters.
I found it interesting as a piece of history
For its style, and for the information it gave me,
But I rarely found it gripping or exciting.
I can however see how people could.
But I will give this book 3.3 out of 5.0.
The next book I will be reviewing is
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
And that is on 2nd February.
And then on 16th February I am going to review
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I have actually read this book before
It will be only the second book that I have reviewed on this channel that I have read previously,
The first being Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s
Stone because I was reviewing the illustrated edition.
But I want to read this book again,
because I read it when I was younger
And I didn’t get on very well with it at
all
So I want to try again.
I hope you have a great day
I would love to know what you think about
Moby Dick, if you have read it
Also has anybody else seen The Whale?
I would say that my next video will probably
be Phone Friday,
But I said that last week and it turned out not to be true
So my next video will exist
And it will probably be later on this week
I’ll see you soon!
