About Moby Dick

"Call me Ishmael." So begins Herman Melville's 1851 epic, in which a young sailor joins the whaling ship Pequod, commanded by the monomaniacal Captain Ahab — a man consumed by vengeance against the white whale that took his leg.

Sprawling, philosophical, and strange, Moby Dick is at once a thrilling sea adventure, an encyclopedia of whaling, and a profound meditation on obsession, fate, and humanity's struggle against the indifferent vastness of nature.

Why read it: The great American novel — a book whose ambition and depth reward every rereading.