Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study, relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.
Sometimes at dinner he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. And yet, despite my best efforts to look as bored as possible, I found myself hanging on every word. For you see, when my brother and I were very young, my father had told us a bed-time story.
From Nathaniel Philbrick's introduction to Moby-Dick.
[This version is currently on sale at Amazon.]
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