Moby-Dick

I wanted to challenge myself in 2025 and alternate between fiction and non-fiction, so here are my highlights - Crime and Punishment - Homo Deus - Catch 22 - Flash Boys - The Art of Strategy - Moby Dick (could only get halfway through though :() - The Great Gatsby - How to be Alone (couldn't get past 2 chapters)

Moby Dick, Herman Melville VALIS, Philip K Dick Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance + also Lila, Robert Pirsig Naked Lunch, William Burroughs Immortality, Milan Kundera Catch-22, Joseph Heller (pair with The Deserters, Charles Glass -- In fact a lot of the stuff in Catch-22 is actually toned down from reality) Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha, Daniel Ingram (but ignore 80% of it)

I've never really felt like Kafka seems to have and I read a lot, mostly novels. For what it's worth, I don't love Kafka's novels: I think he wanted them burned for a reason -- they're meandering failures. Very clever but they don't go anywhere. His short stories, though, are excellent. Off the top of my head, the most moving books I've read are The First Circle, any long Dostoevsky novel, The Master and Margarita, The Tartar Steppe, any Elena Ferrante, any Cormac McCarthy, some Murakami (Ryu and Haruki), Gene Wolf (The Book of the New Sun), 2666, parts of Moby Dick, any Alice Munro. All well known "good books".

Moby Dick is enhanced by perspective, it's sublime when dwindled to a 3.5 minute LitRap clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al5-bU8DUAg

America made no sense to me until I read Faulkners "Light In August". Its almost 100 years old but those themes persist. Otherwise I would really recommend Moby Dick. Its a rollicking adventure, a wonderful technical description of bygone whaling and ultimately a starting point for introspection on some questions you may be asking yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_in_August#:~:text=Light%... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_in_August#:~:text=Light%20in%20August%20is%20a,gothic%20and%20modernist%20literary%20genres).

I was going to suggest Moby Dick…also not joking!

Tough choices .. Moby Dick has so much to offer .. Gulliver's Travels ... Tristam Shandy ... Essays by Montaigne.. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .... Probably the collected works of Shaw? Things with dialogue feel freah every time you read them.

Amazing book and you totally nailed the reason why it's my all-time favorite. It's a monster story where the book itself is the monster. Instead of seeing the monster through the words of the characters, the reader holds it in their own hands. In our insane pursuit of reading and understanding this monstrous book we become a little bit like Ahab himself by the end. It gives you an impression of something huge lurking behind the pages, something bigger than your comprehension. The pursuit of God, or the Truth, or whatever big universal thing you believe in, is such a huge and terrifying endeavor that it will break a human being if we are too honest about it. Moby Dick is truly an awe-inspiring experience. Also, don't skip the whaling chapters. They are secretly the best parts of the book. Another book that gives off very similar vibes is Don DeLillo's Underworld.

Everyone should read Moby Dick . If the traditional praise is not enough, it is about how hard it is to understand. Code, tech, government, whales, or anything large. I identified with Ahab, mostly because he vacillates between confidence of knowing and fear of unknowing. It is just like working on a large software project.

For many books that I find myself thinking about for years, or just that I enjoyed very much, I will revisit them later. They can be very revealing in how my perspective has changed or that I'll identify with completely different characters, or be awed by a passage that my earlier self overlooked. Several that come to mind are Heart of Darkness Moby Dick Robinson Crusoe Pretty much any Chekhov story Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Moby Dick and Blood Meridian both have a certain biblical feel to them which really hits hard. Can't say they were mind bending but both were nice trips.

see my nick, but in addition to stephenson, the books i come back to over and over again for comfort and wisdom include: - Lord of the Rings: The other bible. Not even the very wise can see all ends; be of good cheer. - A Wrinkle In Time: 9 year old me, there is such a thing as a tesseract, and there is also Mrs. Beast. - The Master and Margarita: apocalyptic reading from someone who knew, and a cat who always pays his way. - the Discworld series: Sir Terry knew our hearts better than most, and sin, young feller, is treatin’ people as things. - If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveler: a perfect joke that you can tell once, plus a love story. - Good Omens: Gaiman and Pratchett team up, what’s not to love? - Moby Dick: And so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content. - Lucky Jim: grad school, a survival guide. Come in on the fa la la las, there’s a good chap. This doesn’t include poetry, which is also in my head constantly.

This is an amazing book, though I jokingly like to describe it as the best beginning and ending prose ever written with 100 chapters of whalefacts.tumblr.com sandwiched in between.

Moby Dick Finally got around to reading it, I was amazed at how modern it felt for a book written in 1850.

The Odyssey The Iliad Moby-Dick Anything by Dostoevsky

Moby Dick I'm halfway through it. I'd held off on reading it for years just due to its reputation but I'm finding it incredibly enjoyable, humorous, and in many ways not at all what I was expecting.

Infinite Jest Ulysses The Selfish Gene The Histories of Herodotus Moby-Dick Gödel, Escher, Bach

Atomic Accidents This is a series of detailed retelling of accidents involving nuclear power, weapons, and radioactive materials generally. It starts with some 19th century hunters wandering into a cave full of radon and ends with Fukushima. The twist here is that the author is a major proponent of nuclear energy and research. It's fascinating to see someone take an in depth look at the flaws of a cause they support, it has just the right amount of technical detail for me, and it really sheds light on how the wildest bugs get into any system. Dept. of Speculation A mostly unflinching look at a difficult modern relationship from a woman's perspective. There are some hard truths in it that are surprisingly easy to swallow. Moby Dick I read this novel in high school but it didn't have much impact on me then. It is an unbelievably rich experience now, filled with all the wonder, terror, joy, and boredom that comes from trying to find your own meaning.

Watchmen (Alan Moore) Origins of Form (Christopher Williams) Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower) The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki) Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich) Moby Dick (Herman Melville) Bolo'Bolo (P.M.) Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock) Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco) Neuromancer (William Gibson) The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham) Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)

If you want "crazy-to-grasp", you want Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Moby Dick, House of Leaves, etc. Not that "crazy-to-grasp" approximates "good" in any way.

East of Eden is my favorite book I've read in the last several years. Beautiful end to end and very moral. If you've read it it's totally worth reading Journal of a Novel: a collection of letters Steinbeck wrote to his editor every day as he was writing East of Eden. It's a fascinating window into the mind of a master deliberately creating a masterpiece. Other favorites: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, In Our Time by Hemingway, The Magus by John Fowles, 100 years of solitude, Moby Dick (perhaps a precursor to all modern fantasy?) Stranger in a Strange Land, and Infinite Jest. I've also loved both of DFW's big essay collections: Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never Do Again.

It's so hard to recommend something without a frame of reference. Personally, I've found myself re-reading The Lord of the Rings lately. But, if I had to pick one book that was my favourite, I might say Moby Dick. (I'll admit that I actually read it first after seeing the Wrath of Khan as a kid)

Melville's Moby Dick, Crockford's Javascript: the good parts, Vonnegut's short stories, Defoe's Adventures and Piracies of captain Singleton (not about the design pattern), Amsterdam in the 70s. Not a single new release though.

Right now, Charlie Stross Wireless, a short story collection. However, what I'm going to read very shortly will be Moby-Dick for the third time; my daughter just read it in her high school English class and it became clear to me that it's time to read it again. Good Lord, that man could turn a phrase.

Moby Dick is one of my all time favorite classics. Should appeal to engineers and entrepreneurs as well as being a great read. The form is very unlike other classics of its period.

_Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ --Douglas Hofstadter _Moby-Dick_ --Herman Melville

Moby-Dick The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman