Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I started this audiobook during a particularly brutal stretch of grading sophomore essays on The Great Gatsby. Twenty-four hours and forty-two minutes seemed like a commitment. A real commitment. The kind of commitment my wife Denise gives me a look about when she sees another 25-hour epic queued up on my phone. But here's the thing about Moby Dick - I've taught excerpts of this novel for years, assigned the famous chapters, quoted Ahab in faculty meetings when I wanted to sound profound. I'd never actually finished it. (Don't tell my students. Or my department head. Or anyone who's ever heard me pontificate about American literature.)
So there I was, walking the Chicago lakefront in early November, wind cutting through my jacket, watching the gray water of Lake Michigan churn against the rocks, and Stewart Wills started in with "Call me Ishmael." And I thought - okay, Marcus. Twenty years of pretending. Time to actually do this.
The Performance That Made Me Get It
Here's what I didn't expect: Stewart Wills made me understand why this book matters. Not in an academic sense - I already had that. I mean feel why it matters. His voice has this quality that's hard to describe - weathered, maybe? Like someone who's spent time around old ships and older men. When he shifts into Ahab's obsessive monologues, there's a controlled madness there. Not theatrical. Not over the top. Just this slow burn of a man who's lost something essential to himself and decided the whole universe owes him for it.
The character differentiation is where Wills really earns his keep. Queequeg gets this warm, measured dignity. Starbuck sounds like a man constantly calculating odds he knows are bad. And Ishmael - our narrator, our guide through this whole wild enterprise - comes across exactly as he should: an observer who's both inside and outside the madness, equally fascinated and horrified. Now, I've seen some folks online note that Wills' accent work can be distracting in spots. I didn't find that, personally, but I was also listening while Lake Michigan tried to convince me it was actually the North Atlantic. Context matters.
What surprised me most was how Wills handles the philosophical digressions. And let me tell you, there are digressions. Melville will stop the plot dead to give you a 45-minute lecture on the taxonomy of whales or the economics of the whaling industry or the precise technique for rendering blubber into oil. In print, I've always found these sections... challenging. But Wills reads them with this quality of genuine intellectual curiosity, like he's working through ideas in real time. It transforms what could be dry encyclopedia entries into something that feels like sitting in on a particularly good lecture. (And I say this as someone who gives lectures for a living and knows how rare "particularly good" actually is.)
The Book Itself - Why It Still Works
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about American literature - that it all comes from one book, and that book is Huckleberry Finn. I've always thought he was half right. The other half comes from here. Melville was doing things in 1851 that novelists still struggle with. The shifting perspectives. The way the narrative voice slides from intimate first-person to almost documentary detachment. The chapters that read like stage plays. The catalog chapters that feel like prose poems. The whole thing shouldn't work. It shouldn't cohere.
But it does. Somehow. And in audio, with Wills guiding you through, you feel the architecture of it more clearly than you might on the page. The cetology chapters aren't interruptions - they're the ship taking on provisions before the next leg of the hunt. The sermons and soliloquies aren't digressions - they're the book teaching you how to listen to it.
I will say - and I'm being honest here because what's the point otherwise - there are stretches in the middle where I zoned out. Caught myself thinking about lesson plans or wondering if I'd remembered to email that parent back. The pacing isn't modern. It's 19th-century pacing, which means patient in ways contemporary audiences might find frustrating. But every time I drifted, something would pull me back. A line that hit differently than I expected. A description that felt suddenly, terribly relevant to whatever existential crisis I was quietly nurturing that week.
Who This Is Actually For
Let me be real: this audiobook is not for everyone. It's not a beach read. It's not a "tune out while doing dishes" listen. My students would hate this. They'd last maybe three chapters before texting me questions I'd have to pretend to answer thoughtfully. But if you're someone who's always meant to tackle the big American novels - if you've got guilt about the classics you've pretended to have read - if you want to understand why writers still circle back to Melville the way ships circle back to port - this is the version to try.
Listen at 1.0x. The prose deserves to be savored. Wills' performance deserves to breathe. And honestly, you're already committing to nearly 25 hours. What's the rush?
I finished it on a Sunday morning, walking past the Shedd Aquarium, watching tourists take photos of the skyline. The ending hit me harder than I expected. Not because I didn't know what was coming - everyone knows what happens to the Pequod. But because Wills delivers it with such quiet inevitability. Such grief. I stood there for a minute, in the cold, with my earbuds in, just... processing.
Denise asked me later if I was okay. I told her I'd finally finished Moby Dick. She said, "Didn't you read that in grad school?" And I said yes, which was technically true. But I hadn't really read it until now.
This is why we still read the classics. This is why some books survive. And this is one of the finest audiobook performances I've encountered of one of the most difficult novels in the American canon. Worth every hour. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. (Not that I'd ever do such a thing, Principal Martinez.)
