I highly recommend John Houston’s 1956 movie version of Moby Dick. You can’t go wrong with Gregory Peck as Ahab. And screen writing by Ray Bradbury.
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Ulysses by Joyce has beaten me countless times. It stands there on my bookshelf, the undefeated king, defiant. Sometimes I look at it with the side eye, thinking: “What a day it will be when I stab thee!”
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That’s great, that made me laugh! 
so Shakespearean.
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And you are the very model of a modern major general!
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Or inexpensive software WITHOUT subscriptions, preferably.
I truly miss the printed manuals. I use to read them for fun. I can barely get through the online ones.
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If I hadn’t had the official printed manuals for Word 95 and Access 97, I never would have been able to learn them.
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I remember back in the late 90s when the way to learn how to do something in our office was to get the relevant O’Reilly book and take it home for the weekend. 
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Most people I knew never looked at a software manual. They would call for help with a program while the manual was sitting in their office, covered in dust, still wrapped in cellophane.
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Hence the acronym “RTFM”. 
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You could try and listen to it for free
RTE did a version Ulysses - listen to the epic RTÉ dramatisation
Nick
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Them’s fightin’ words. 
I adore Melville, even (especially) later, weird Melville.
Moby Dick (and Ulysses) are both books that benefit from being read aloud. I’ve been known to stand in my living room and declaim some of the more thunderous passages aloud myself, much to the neighbors’ puzzlement. If you want to find your way into Moby Dick, seek out a good audiobook version with a talented narrator—it might carry you along with the text.
Of course, like Bartelby, you might prefer not to.
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I’ve read Ulysses, in fact, I quote from it in one of my book chapters. But I just could not make it though Moby Dick. That said, I recently reread Les Miserables. I love this passage:
What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure of his life, where there was so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him to adore God in his most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one’s feet that which can be cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.
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I read a LOT of the Dummies books.
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I just tried re-reading Moby Dick recently. I got about half-way through and bailed out. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.
I’m in the process of relearning how to read books, particularly novels. I’ve gotten so accustomed to reading articles and essays online that my skill at reading books has atrophied.
Yesterday I found myself effortlessly reading a novel for a few hours, and it was a breakthrough. That’s often how I would spend a day as a teenager, but I’ve lost the knack for it.
The novel, by the way, was “Concrete Blonde,” the third Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly. I loved the TV series and hear the actors’ voices in my head when I’m reading.
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My Moby Dick advice is to plan to read it twice. The first time, just skim every time you’re bogging down. You’ll find the more narrative parts that way. The second time, you’ll know the structure of the book and can either skip to what you want, or read it all with the benefit of knowing where it’s going.
Fantastic! I know what you mean about rediscovering that knack. I can’t believe I let myself lose it for awhile.
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I’m not sure why, but that made me laugh. So, I can’t get through Moby Dick the first time so the advice is to read it twice.
That’s like saying I can’t run 1 mile so run two.
I’m just having fun, I’m not criticizing in the least.
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Beatings will continue until morale improves. 
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If you could make it through Ulysses, I’m impressed. You can make it through anything. I loved “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”. Joyce is terrific, especially with his stream of consciousness which is really how we think. “Les Miserables” was good. I love to read but I read mostly nonfiction.
I also read mostly non-fiction but fiction expands one’s imagination and insights, which is why I’m intentional in adding fiction and other classics to my reading list. That said, a large portion of my reading is non-fiction (well, some of the non-fiction is in fact fiction but that’s another story) :-), in the areas of philosophy, epistemology, history, sociology, theology, ethics, and the like. Sometimes I need to come up for air by reading good fiction and classics. 
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