If you are going to read three books in your life, read the "Iliad", Shakespeare ( you pick ) and Moby Dick. Without a doubt Moby Dick is the greatest American novel ever written. I read it, the Scarlet Letter and others in high school. PETA has banned Moby Dick from schools due to cruelity to animals. It is the struggle of man, good and evil, God and the devil, civilized and uncivilized, the clash of cultures, man vs nature and Melville wrapped it up into the chase for the whale. He reached for the stars and they touched him with greatest.
Moby Dick was listed as one of the 10 most boring books in some survey I saw, along with Don Quioxte. I have to agree although the first few chapters of Don Quioxte were pretty funny.
"PETA has banned Moby Dick from schools due to cruelity (sic) to animals."
I certainly haven't heard that. What it is, is cruelty to kids in school. Moby Dick is a great book, I reread it every few years (that great first paragraph always pulls me in...), but it's not about whales. It's about obsession, and what it can do to a person. That's something we understand better by our forties than we do in our teens.
Sorry, I have a Master in English Literature and am ABD in American Literature, and I cannot stand Melville. I would place Huckleberry Finn far above Moby Dick in terms of the Great Amerrican Novel