Moby Dick was a great book well deserving of it’s status as a classic but it was not what I was expecting. Melville is heavy on the details—to the point that you learn a lot of, now outdated, stuff about whales, whalers and whaling in general. I expected more of the white whale. Though he looms over the entire book he spends precious little time as it’s focus. Melville’s writing style is somewhat like that of Joyce in Ulysses, the same attempt to capture the local language and color and switching writing formats from standard prose to play writing. Melville, unlike Joyce IMHO, handles it well and it is neither overpowering nor distracting. A great book for detail oriented people.