Moby Dick

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Herman Melville

Penguin Classics, New York, 2009; originally published in 1851, English

Fiction

8.6 x 5.4 inches, paperback, 672 pages

ISBN: 9780143105954

Suggested Retail Price: $18.00

On 8 book lists

Steven Holl

On Steven Holl’s Book List

Phyllis Lambert

On Phyllis Lambert’s Book List

At university Herman Melville’s Moby Dick mesmerized me by its vast range of space and ideas coupled with a cataloguing of minutiae, the sublime antiquarian language, the smell of puritanical early American settlement, the Pequod and its crew as metaphor for the United States racially and politically, and the idea of alternative learning expressed by Ishmael for whom the adventures of the Pequod were his Yale and his Harvard.

Greg Lynn

On Greg Lynn’s Book List

I first read this book when I was 14 years old while a volunteer first mate on a concrete sailboat in Lake Erie taking at-risk teens offshore for three to five days at a time. Everything about that summer was a bad idea except reading Moby Dick. Later, it was required reading during my first year of college at Miami University of Ohio and I have read it over and over since. More than a decade ago I splurged and bought the Arion Press edition and read it to my children as babies to help them fall asleep.

Margaret McCurry

On Margaret McCurry’s Book List

Eric Owen Moss

On Eric Owen Moss’s Book List

Jaquelin Robertson

On Jaquelin Robertson’s Book List

Michael Rock

On Michael Rock’s Book List

Another benchmark book I reread once every ten years or so and it never disappoints. I love Melville’s thoroughly modern assemblage of genres: jumping from adventure narrative to travelogue to anthropological treatise to natural history text. Plus it speaks to the New Englander in me.

Tod Williams

On Tod Williams’s Book List

It took me years to appreciate, and once embraced it may never be surpassed. At first it was the story, ultimately the detail. Another life I would have liked to live.

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