It gets a bad rep for being hard to read (which it is because of the sea-faring and archaic vocabulary) but it’s surprisingly entertaining with even a casual/jovial tone at times. I haven’t finished it, but so far like 30% of the book is irrelevant to the plot and is just the authors random musings and philosophies on life. He dedicates entire pages to debating what the most comfortable room temperature and position to sleep in is, or his opinions on random countries like Japan or “Affghanistan”. It almost reads like blogposts or diary entries.
He also has surprisingly modern humor and opinions. He makes borderline gay jokes when he has to sleep in bed with an African man “Queequog”, and then describes how he respects him, saying “the man’s a human being just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me…better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” and that “It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin”. The two develop this wholesome Rush Hour style partnership that’s pretty funny.
There’s also one part where he states that even though he’s Christian, he respects anyone’s beliefs as long as they hurt noone.
I also really liked how it occasionally shifts to the 1st person perspective of Captain Ahab or Starbuck for a chapter which adds good variety.
You’re being a lot more amused by it than I was. I listened to the audiobook because I would never have been able to get through it otherwise.
The entire, long chapter about the color white may still be coming up for you. I just couldn’t believe a huge irrelevant digression to discuss the color white in the middle of a book that was actually telling a story. That just was not what I was expecting.
I’ve actually read that and funny enough it’s probably my favorite chapter in the entire book so far, so we might have different tastes in reading lol.
But out of all the digressions in the book, I think that one was actually pretty relevant because Moby Dick is described as ghastly white, so that entire chapter is basically foreshadowing Moby Dick’s reveal.