Moby Dick was one of the handful of items that came with my Kindle when it was purchased. (Along with the King James Bible, and Huckleberry Finn and maybe Sherlock Holmes.) Or I’m pretty sure it was. I have been avoiding the great white whale the whole of my life, and I can’t imagine I would have spent cash on it.

Call me disinterested.

I realize that Moby Dick is included in nearly every list of great works of American literature, but after that memorable opening line …

I have noted here, a time or two, that I really like large tracts of Dune and Catch-22, but I have never finished either book. And I have failed to slog through Dune probably a dozen times. (I would like to note, however, that since I published the list of unfinished books, in the link that begins this paragraph, I have read Lord Jim and rather liked it.)

Moby Dick is different. Probably a half-dozen times I’ve gotten the command from the storyteller to “call me Ishmael”, but I doubt that I ever have gotten more than five pages in.

The language is stilted (1850s America, when overwriting and long-lost terms were in vogue), and nothing happens very quickly … and I set it aside. Again. And again.

But presented with a day off, with nothing new or pressing left in the Kindle, and keen to disconnect from 2013 as much as possible, I plowed on with Ishmael and the rest, fighting through the tedious passages of seamen ashore (thank goodness for Queequeg) … and now I am more than halfway through the book.

Will I make it to the end?

Not if Melville persists in 20-page asides on his opinion of why a whale is a fish and his outline of all the major whales in the world, ordered by family … or by whole chapters in which he builds a case going back to antiquity in which he insists that humans are afraid of white creatures.

Just now, the crew of the Pequod has caught a sperm whale and killed it, and a right whale, too, and I can get through this. I have some curiousity about the age of sail, and that includes the floating charnel houses that were 19th century whalers.

When it gets slow again, as I am sure it will, I will struggle on, like a crewman at the oars of a boat carrying a harpooneer towards his prey. Reading this is, I guess, the intellectual equivalent of eating my vegetables. It apparently is good for me, though I lack any real appetite for it.

I confess that I somehow got a private school education, in high school, and emerged from college with a double major of history and journalism, yet managed to avoid reading nearly any classic. Some of that was accident. Some of it was me avoiding classes with long reading lists.

In a sense, then, reading Twain and Conrad and, yes, Melville, is perhaps my guilt at avoiding those onerous tasks finally catching up to me, all these decades later.

I might even give Catch-22 another try. But probably not. Let’s see if I can get to the end of Captain Ahab, first.