I quit the first time, too. It’s not an action yarn. It’s a literary gem. Hope that helps. 
Uh…I have no idea. Is there more than one version there?
I listened to most of it on a couple of 13 hour drives to and from a relative’s house for Thanksgiving.
I loved Moby Dick. I’d already read Victor B. Schaeffer’s The Year of the Whale, which follows a year in the life of a sperm whale, and he constantly refers to Moby Dick.
There’s a lot in there – not just Ahab vs. the Whale and Ishmael and Queequeg, but also the Business and Mechanics of Whaling, and the Symbolism of the Whale.
I can understand getting bored with it – I’ve been bored with other Meliville works, some of which I had to give up on. If it helps, Moby Dick hasn’t been a best-seller since it was written, and for a time Meliville was viewed as a minor and obscure writer, but he came back in the 20th century. Moby Dick has been adapted for the screen at least three times.
Heinlein claimed that the great Russian novels are even more impenetrable in the original Russian.
Try some shorter Melville first, to set the lights down low and get you “in the mood.”
“Bartleby the Scrivener” is also a bona fide literary classic, very rewarding.
“Benito Cerino” is lesser known, but is a tour de force of horror and suspense…the only piece of fiction I had to read IMMEDIATELY over just after I finished it, to find out whut-th’-hail had been going on while I was reading it the FIRST time.
Which is what Melville wanted you to do, I’m sure. He was such a trickster!!!
John Astin was almost frightened out of the arts because of it:
Billy Budd was totally gay. And since Billy was a Christ figure the narrator had a hard-on for Jesus.
I would prefer not to. 
It was a perfect portrait of the sort of person drawn to scrivenery, drafting, and other careers for the OCDs among us who think that there are worse ways to make a living than staring a a sheet of paper, making sure every detail is exact. A psychologist once told me, “At least you chose the right profession.”
I’m listening to/reading along with it now with the Moby Dick Big Read where various artists (some of whom you’ve actually heard of) read a chapter a day.
And I like it so far. Breaking into chunks helps, as does not having to worry about symbolism or parallels to other 19th century literature or whatever else English teachers try to do with it. Someone also said to think of it as a blog by some guy named Ishmael who occasionally posts long rambling discourses on whale fishing and has a tendency to get lost in the middle of his posts. It works surprisingly well taken like that.
I read it for leisure and personally enjoyed it, but I’ve always enjoyed stories that go off on long tangents in excruciating detail about obscure, long dead professions.
There is that, but reading like that is almost as uncommon as books to do it with these days. Though nobody ever called Wells a great writer I like to do that with the beginning of War of the Worlds. It was a different time.
It isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It is a way to pass time with beautifully written prose that at times is high falutin’ and at times deliberately tedious. It is not meant to be read by a person in a hurry, but by somebody who can and will sit by the seaside or in a cafe all day long.
Dear god no! Please not “Old Man and the Sea”, anything but that. I mean I barely finished it. It’s basically a 20 page short story padded out to a 100 pages. It seemed as though 50 plus pages were devoted to “Hey the sea looks nice today”. Ernie, I get it. Most of the time fishing is fucking boring. I’ve been fishing before, I already knew most of the time nothing happens. You didn’t have to go nuts overdoing it by making most of your book pointless. (If I wanted that experience I wouldn’t read your book you drunk, I’d just go fishing instead.)
Gee, can anybody tell I’m not much of a fan of that book?
FWIW, the STAR TREK episode “The Doomsday Machine” was their version of Ahab and the Whale.* 
*This is according to Leonard Nimoy.
That’s not totally true, I don’t think. In fact, I would venture to suggest it’s false, except there’s often not much chance to establish false readings in literature…where do you see sentimentalism in Moby Dick, not even to talk about “firmly within the tradition”?
At any rate, to suggest that Moby Dick is a conventional novel for its time is to misunderstand what conventions were like in 1850. From a London review: “There is so much eccentricity in its style and in its construction, in the original conception and in the gradual development of its strange and improbable story, that we are at a loss to determine in what category of works of amusement to place it.” Most reviewers were agreed on the technical description, even though their judgments varied–and as far as I can tell off hand, they were about evenly split between praise and blame. For all that, Moby Dick did not do well commercially, it is true, but it seems an odd thing to me, at least, that people keep mentioning this as though it was a mark of anything but the fact that it didn’t sell well.
Early Melville (Typee to Mardi, even into White Jacket) was pretty conventional, and much better received, than Moby Dick, of course. However, those conventions were not those of the sentimental novel alone (many people will have read one, actually–David Copperfield, for instance) which itself was a genre on the way out, but rather of the romance, a much broader genre. And it’s similarly problematical to separate the reviewers of the novel into critics and authors–many critics, Melville included, were themselves authors.
Or sit reading aloud by the bed of a friend in a deep, deep coma.
I don’t think one need apologise for failing to finish a book that has a chapter about just how white that whale was. With a bonus explanation of what white is:
Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors…
I did make it through Moby Dick but would rate it as one of the toughest books I have ever read when it came to maintaining my interest level. There is just so much padding around the central story it seems the plot progresses for only about one page in every twenty.
I do read a lot of older books and you do find the pacing was certainly much slower than modern readers might be used to but Moby Dick takes it to a whole different level. I would say there is a good short story in there trying to get out from under the weight of 400 pages of padding.
If you do want to know every minute detail about 19th century Whaling though it would be right up your street.
I found finishing MD to be a bit of a slog, but I found scattered throughout the book enough succulent nuggets to make it heartily memorable.
How long did that take? It took me a month or so to read my daughter Little House on the Prairie.
Early on I decided that the book’s plot was a metaphor for whaling…buried deep beneath the sea of the chapters was the plot, and once in a long while the plot would surface, and I’d shout, “THAR SHE BLOWS!” before the plot dove out of sight, and the long wait for something, goddamn anything to happen would recommence.
When I hit the chapter about people standing on top of crows nests, no, make that people standing on top of things, no, make that things on top of other things, like statues and shit, anyway people on crows nests, and here’s a five page description of a totally awesome crows-nest with like a wet bar and everything, but no, that’s not the kind of crow’s nest this ship has–that chapter was when I felt the end approaching. When I realized I was reading a chapter about the color white, I threw in the towel, was done. I, unlike Ahab, wasn’t determined to kill my whale, and the plot dove forever beneath the surface.
I think there’s another version where each chapter is read by a different narrator. If yours had the same narrator all the way through then it’s probably the one I listened to.