/lit/ - Literature

I have the UC Press one and it’s fantastic.

Unironically filtered by this mess of a book. Speaking to friends and trying to read a bit more about it afterwards helped, but I still can't see how it constitutes "one of the great american novels". I understand that on some level it's supposed to reflect on and characterize the consequences of the west's relationship with religion, but I found it structurally mind-numbing.
>Oh yeah hehe met tribal and joined whaling cr-WHALEFACTS WHALEFACTS WHALEFACTS - oh yeah and then ahab-WHALEFACTS WHALEFACTS AND SOME MORE WHALEFACTS
is there some ironic wit to the structure that I'm missing? Does the book derive its high standing from appraisals by people who consider that to have been some kind of groundbreaking innovation in literature?
Are the endlessly banal scientific breakdowns supposed to mean something more, or expose the stupidity and ineffectuality of attempting to contain the divine in this way?
Answer me /lit/.

Reading Moby-Dick for the first time, I'm about 1/4 of the way through.
Where does the hate come from? This is fucking great, but nearly everybody I talk to who has read it vehemently dislikes it. When I tell somebody I'm reading Moby-Dick they're shocked and react as if I'm some sort of masochist

>>14792330
Best: Arion Press and Pegasus Books for hardcovers
Underrated: Barnes & Noble Classics, Ignatius Press and hardcover editions from NYRB Classics

Read it and weep:

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
― Herman Melville

https://americanliterature.com/author/herman-melville/book/moby-dick-or-the-whale/summary

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701

>>14435950
>best book written in English
Moby's Dick obviously.