Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I reread this book for a summer school program I'm doing this week, and it has been such a pleasure to return. This time around, I really noticed the structure of the book. Melville does a really beautiful job lining the chapters up, so even in the parts where there's not a lot of action, the text progresses, and regresses, and moves in a really compelling way. I also noticed the humor this time around--there are parts that are downright *funny* that I hadn't appreciated before. I think there's also real character development in Ishmael--when he tells the Town-Ho's story, he projects outward to Lima, presumably after the voyage. When Ishmael starts his story, he has the hypos and is so anti-social as to try to sleep on a bench in the common area rather than share his bed with a stranger, and throughout his journey on the Pequod he seems isolated from both captain and crew (after Ahab convinces the crew to join him in the hunt for Moby Dick, Ishmael comments, after all is said and done, "I, Ishmael, was one of that crew..."--otherwise you'd never know it from his narration of these events). While Ishmael does bond with Queequeg, even this bond is limited (if not dropped entirely in the latter parts of the book--for a good reading see Geoffrey Sanborn's "Whence come you, Queequeg?"). But in Lima, Ishmael's sitting around telling stories with a bunch of friends, behavior we've never before seen him engaged in. I think this behavior indicates a change in Ishmael from the time he journeyed on the Pequod to the time he tells the Town-Ho's story at Lima: he has become more sociable. I also find myself much more sympathetic to Ahab as time goes on. Finally, as I have noticed before, this book is all about knowledge, epistemology, and writing. I'll definitely be coming back to this story as time goes on.