It gets a bad rep for being hard to read (which it is because of the sea-faring and archaic vocabulary) but it’s surprisingly entertaining with even a casual/jovial tone at times. I haven’t finished it, but so far like 30% of the book is irrelevant to the plot and is just the authors random musings and philosophies on life. He dedicates entire pages to debating what the most comfortable room temperature and position to sleep in is, or his opinions on random countries like Japan or “Affghanistan”. It almost reads like blogposts or diary entries.
He also has surprisingly modern humor and opinions. He makes borderline gay jokes when he has to sleep in bed with an African man “Queequog”, and then describes how he respects him, saying “the man’s a human being just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me…better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” and that “It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin”. The two develop this wholesome Rush Hour style partnership that’s pretty funny.
There’s also one part where he states that even though he’s Christian, he respects anyone’s beliefs as long as they hurt noone.
I also really liked how it occasionally shifts to the 1st person perspective of Captain Ahab or Starbuck for a chapter which adds good variety.
We created modernity. We don’t all know each other — I’ve only met some through working with them. Some of this work was done at schools and observatories. As a sidenote, as a musician at heart, human beings are the only animals that can appreciate and play music. But very few can write songs or musical works, it turns out. Even if they can credibly play a few chords or an instrument, they rarely can string together a whole song, much less in concert with other musicians (there is usually a band leader and director, also, who is typically the composer or writer, meaning there was only one person writing the song itself, but with the aid of trained musicians to play it). Writing or creating music (and I assume any form of art or philosophy or science or cogent political ideas) is quite difficult and out of most people’s reach.