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Title: "Dick" is a "bitch"...
Review: Moby Dick is not a fun book to read. The prose is old-fashioned, and that is partly what vitiates the pleasure (cf. Ivanhoe). Primarily, however, it is boring, plain and simple. There are endless digressions, and asides, and plot-sabbaticals. Very easy to put down. Undoubtedly an amazing intellectual feat to pull off (hence my five stars), but still...I'd estimate that 1% of high-schoolers assigned this book end up actually reading it. Can't blame them, either. To be fair, the last twenty pages, when Ahab and Starbuck have their final tete-a-tete, and Ahab famously snarls to his finned nemesis "From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!" do cause a frisson. And I don't regret reading the book...it's a great laurel to rest on, but I will never pick it up again. Eh, give 'er a go...if you finish it, you'll know that you're a man, not a boy.
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