I know you're not allowed to 'not like' Moby Dick, but in honesty I didn't enjoy it very much, and my laborious pursuit of the final page of the ample tome is material enough for many a frivolous analogy with Captain Ahab's own undertaking. I liked the start -- it was mostly about people. After that, save for tantalisingly occasional people-oriented diversions, it was mostly about whales. This, perhaps, should not have surprised me as much as it did. But it was *really* about whales…not just in a symbolic or allegoric way so as to indulge the would-be poet/philosopher in me, but in a detailed, nuts-and-bolts, zoologic/mechanistic type way that showed up the short attention span of my should-be scientific mind. The cetological taxonomies are wonderfully emblematic of what I eventually found all too wearying about the book. This excerpt from Chapter 32, for example: "First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into...