Written by American novelist Herman Melville, Moby Dick was published in 1851. Reading was one of only two forms of indoor entertainment back then; the other was attending parties where you were forced to listen to the host’s teenage daughter play the pianoforte for hours.
Even though it had a lot of words that would kill many idle hours, Melville's novel was not well received. Just about everyone hated it. Especially the parts about whales, which, sad to say, make up large portions of the book.
Despite its lackluster launch, Moby Dick ranks way up there among the greatest books of all time. It’s certainly the fishiest. True, some scholars argue for Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. But Dick is seven times longer than Old Man, and whales are way bigger than marlin. Thus, The Classics Slacker must give the nod to Dick.
You might have noticed that the Classics Slacker spells Moby Dick without a hyphen. It often appears with a hyphen. The Classics Slacker has meticulously researched this hyphen/no hyphen question and still hasn’t reached a definitive conclusion. The decision to go hyphenless here was made really only to save keystrokes.
With or without hyphen, Moby Dick has 135 chapters. Among them: “Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes”; “The Great Heidelburgh Tun”; “Ambergris”; “A Bower in the Arsacides”; “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton.”
Which book would you rather read? The Classics Slacker couldn’t agree more.