Author: Herman Melville
My Rating: 2/5
As I got towards the end of this book, I was wondering how I would sum up my thoughts on it. It’s not the longest book I’ve ever read, but it felt extremely long. I try not to read other reviews until I write out my own thoughts, but in this case I cheated.
Matt on Goodreads wrote a review that summed up my thoughts almost perfectly. I won’t post his review here, but you can read it over on Goodreads to find out how I felt about it. In short, I didn’t find it an enjoyable to read – it was just long and with not much payoff at the end, in my opinion.
However, I did discover a few things during the reading of this book that I’ll probably continue to do.
I usually take notes on non-fiction books and write down quotes of fiction books that I find interesting – however with Moby Dick I summed up each chapter in a sentence or two. I think this was helpful to me. Especially if I went a couple of days without reading, I could easily get caught up on what had happened in the last couple chapters. Since Moby Dick has 135 chapters, this ended up being a lot of notes.
The other thing I started doing was reading 2 books at once, which is something I’ve never done before and actually was against, until now. While reading Moby Dick, I also read Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and got started Origins of Existence. I think it really helped me stick with Moby Dick and not get burned out on reading entirely – being able to switch to something completely different.
Last year, I did get burned out a couple of times – while reading Basic Economics, Jordan Peterson’s, and Barack Obama’s books. I think reading a second, lighter, easier book would’ve definitely helped me during those books as well. So I’m going to stick to reading 2 books at once for now.
The other tool I used to help me keep going when I was really struggling was reading along in my book while I had the audiobook from YouTube playing in my headphones. I don’t think I’ll make this a regular practice.