http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/aug/07/most-difficult-books-top-10

Anne Call Me Ahab Finger thinks that Ishmael, being a schoolteacher from an aristocratic family, is trying to prove his working-class cred and keeps failing by going all metaphysical. I’m not sure that’s unique to him though: almost every white character on the Pequod with a speaking part tends to draw a sermon out of everyday events, don’t they?

A few weeks ago, I wrote on Eleanor Arnason’s facebook wall, “Josh Lukin about Eleanor’s having characterized Melville’s novels as science fiction. What most strikes me about their resemblance to SF (and I’m sure H. Bruce Franklin had this insight long ago) is that, subsequent to the Popular Front fiction of the 30s and 40s, SF is the genre most likely to pay that kind of meticulous attention to work. Look at the amount of “It Walks in Beauty” devoted to explaining the factory setting; look at _Slow River_; look at _The Space Merchants_ . . . less common in litfic, although you often run across flashes of it like Philip Roth’s wonderful infodump about glove manufacture in the middle of _American Pastoral_.” At the time, I didn’t know how much controversy C.L.R. James had stirred up in the 1950s by pointing out that Moby-Dick was about industrial labor. I mean, the book devotes hundreds of pages to describe the process of turning raw materials from nature into commodities, and yet the white Cold War critics, in headlong flight from their own working-class forebears, were all, “Political allegory! Ishmael is Democracy and Ahab is Tyranny! Melville was warning us about the Soviets!” I’m not making this up . . .

…round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) they rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and are slaughtered. This book is dedicated to them. – Pratchett

or

He was so badly burned that the only way we identified him was with his dental records. Why he was carrying his dental records with him is a bit of a mystery – Fford

I wonder if there is a comparable work or two that rivals Moby Dick for sheer size, verbosity and whatever else I discover as I read it. (Epics aside, that is).

We seem about to be introduced to this Captain Ahab in Chapter XXII, but Melville, not wanting to rush things, elects at this point to give an account of the history and literature of whaling. Of course you knew all along that Louis XIV outfitted several whaling ships at his own expense, that Alfred the Great wrote the first narrative of a whaling voyage, and that the grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Folger, who had something or other to do with the whaling industry. Nevertheless, you are grateful to be reminded of these facts, and the story can wait.

Unless you are interested in a catalogue of famous pictures of whales, the manufacture of rope lines, the anatomy of a whale’s eye, ear and tail, how to skin a whale and cook the blubber, and the history of whaling from Perseus to the present, you would do well to turn from Chapter XXXVI to Chapter CXXXIII without delay, thus saving nearly a hundred chapters without anybody’s knowing the different if you keep quiet. After all, Ahab isn’t the only one entitled to be a skipper.

One of the best lines is where he tells us that Captain Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast for the first person to spot the whale, or the first person up on deck after dark with a claw-headed hammer.