The easy way to read Moby-Dick Moby-Dick, which tells the story of sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, has been chosen four times on Desert Island Discs - by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, J G Ballard, Penelope Lively and Patricia Highsmith. In its own day, it was received by many critics as a deranged rant. Henry F. Chorley, chief critic of London's The Athenaeum, called it "trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature." The book, which was originally published in England by Richard Bentley as The Whale, is a beautiful and beguiling novel, full of metaphor, imagery and sexual innuendo (the Victorians didn't quite get what Melville was up to in his writing about sex, as, for example, in his short story The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids), and is by turns angry, playful and ironic, with searing soliloquies worthy of King Lear. New York-born Melville (1819-1891) used his travels in the Pacific in the 1840s as the basis for Moby-Dick, published when he was 31. An example of the memorable prose is: 'There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.' But there's not getting away from the fact that it's a tough read (it took me eight months in small portions). As John Updike wrote: "Moby-Dick represents the utter blank horror of the universe if Godless. Melville has been described as a mystic, but to me he has nothing of mysticism such as might be ascribed to Wordsworth or D. H. Lawrence. Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reasons we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive. If that's put you off, here are three solutions if you to bluff your way through Moby-Dick. 1 • You could listen to an audio version. The Big Read is an online project from Peninsula Arts (The public arts programme of Plymouth University) in which a chapter is broadcast per day. Past readers have included Stephen Fry, Tilda Swinton and David Cameron. Still to come are chapters read by Benedict Cumberbatch, Brian Patten and Cerys Matthews. 2 • Watch one of the film adaptations. One of the best is considered to be the 1956 version starring Gregory Peck and Orson Welles with a screenplay by John Huston but John Barrymore (1930), Jack Aranson (1978), Patrick Stewart (1998) and William Hurt (2011) have all played Captain Ahab. 3 • Read the remarkable children's board book from Cozy Classics in which Brothers Jack Wang and Holman Wang use needle felted figures to tell Moby-Dick in 12 words. Sailor. Boat. Captain. Leg. Mad. Sail. Find. Whale. Chase. Smash. Sink. Float. Put that way, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about.