As you'll find out later this week, Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels, and I keep trying and failing to replicate the experience with other stories by Herman Melville; it seems my time would be better spent just re-reading Moby Dick. Billy Budd is not a bad approximation in the loosest possible sense -- it is, after all, a book about sailors. But it lacks all of the metaphor and moral punch of Moby Dick, and although I love Melville's prose, it also lacks the total weirdness of Moby Dick, which is an incredibly idiosyncratic novel.