>>8142902
aint bad, it's such a good book that any difficulty is worth it though, to me anyway. some people don't like it, there are long stretches of dryness. Maybe the difficulty is more from how most people typically expect a lot of action, and that's not in this book. It's dry. (worth it for the sperm squishing though, i assure you.)

its not difficult but some people find the whale anatomy chapters tedious. others love them

>>8142908
A lot of this sort of thing were categorized as "boy's adventure" books.

I don't think the book is difficult, I just think sometimes Melville needs to quit jacking off to his prose and just tell the damn story. One unfounded criticism is people bitching about the digressions about the whaling business, but fuck you, you're getting some education out of your literature.

Not at all. Lots of pseuds pick it up because it ranks high on a lot of lists, then they realize they can't navigate around the occasional archaic term or unconventionally assembled sentence, and they dismiss it as dense old shit with nothing important to say.

Contextual reading comprehension is a skill that more people need.

I never knew it was considered difficult, considering I enjoyed it as a teenager who read barely anything and only briefly had to look up the occasional whaling term a handful of times. And the Christian sermon in the middle is a bit rough but if this is difficult reading then I don't even know what's easy.

>>8142902
There's like 3 or 4 stories there. You've got to read the book more than that to appreciate it.

>>8142921
*by this I meant to say that it's not at all difficult in the first place.

>>8142921
This.

Also I'd like to add, the overall story of Moby Dick in recent decades has been very influential in movies and video games and whatnot, non-readers or amateur readers pick up the book thinking that it's a fun piece of pop fiction and then it turns out to be the first real piece of literature they've ever attempted, naturally it alienates quite a few.

>>8142902
I'm reading it at the moment. It's definitely not beach reading, but it's not stylistically difficult in the way Faulkner is, or difficult in the way Tolstoy is (length). The whaling chapters do become a chore sometimes but it's so worth it. I just read the try-works and it was was an incredible chapter, also a few chapters ago they pulled an ebin prank on some French Whalers that was fucking hilarious.

>>8142902
It's basically an encyclopedia for whales.

>>8142902
it depends. i find melville often appeals to my sense of humor, especially in this book, so i don't have too much trouble reading thru.

How would you guys compare its difficulty to Mason & Dixons? I just finished the latter and thought it was pretty challenging but still enjoyable and I plan to tackle the other big MD next

i think it's a matter of expectations
if you go in expecting a plot-heavy adventure about ahab and the whale, it's probably extremely frustrating
if you know from the get go that it's a big freewheeling rhapsody about how rad melville thinks whaling is, complete with his thoughts on life, the universe and everything, with a neat subplot about a vengeful captain, then you're in for good times

>>8142902
Why is the sky red? Why are the men in the bottom right so cartoony? Why did they pick such a god awful tacky font?

Is there a single Penguin Deluxe Edition that isn't utter dogshit?

>>8145460

>Why is the sky red?
wine-red sky :^)

>Why are the men in the bottom right so cartoony?
one of them, the right one immediately behind the harpooner, literally has nostrils set wider than eyes... cannot unsee