Welcome to the Moby-Dick Readalong

Happy 200th Birthday Herman Melville!

From Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
by Raymond M. Weaver, 1921

On this day in 1819, Melville was born in New York City to Allan Melville (a merchant whose father was a Revolutionary War hero) and Maria Gansevoort (whose father was a commander at Fort Stanwix during the Revolutionary War).

Which is why I have picked this day of all days to start my long-awaited, much-anticipated Moby-Dick Readalong.

The plan is to read a chapter of the book, 

then listen to the matching podcast episode from the Moby-Dick Big Read.

That's 137 chapters (including the Extracts and Epilogue).

Trying to read Moby-Dick in just one month felt way too ambitious for me right now.
A chapter-a-day is also too big a commitment.
So I have simply set a start date and an end date with the idea of reading and listening to 3-4 chapters a week.
This allows for a slow week or two when life gets busy, with catch up sessions during the quieter weeks.
I will use a Google Doc spreadsheet to keep me on track, but I won't be following it religiously.

With such an auspicious start date - Melville's 200th birthday - I needed an equally relevant end date.

I chose the month he started writing Moby-Dick in 1850 - February.
Therefore, on the 29th Feb 2020, 170 years after Melville sat down to write this American classic, we will finish our Moby-Dick Readalong.

1st August 2019 - 29th February 2020

That's 30 weeks of Moby-Dick with 4 and half chapters a week to read and listen to. 

I should be able to do that (& still read other stuff as well). 

I will put up regular posts to see how everyone is going and provide encouragement. I will attempt to tweet quotes from each chapter and share images of my copy of Moby-Dick in the wild on twitter and instagram.

I will be reading the lovely Coralie Bickford-Smith designed 2012 Penguin English Library edition of Moby-Dick (with an Afterword by Alfred Kazin).

I'm expecting to hit some choppy waters along the way. Many respected blogger friends have not found Moby-Dick an easy read. Their current well-wishes are couched with knowing eye winks and the occasional guffaws.

Adam @Roof Beam Reader had this to say,

Stunning. One of the most – no, the most elaborately detailed book I have ever read. Not the most exciting plot, not the easiest language, not too many exciting sub-layers to the story. But definitely, positively one of the best books ever written. It took me 7 months to get through (and I’m an insanely fast reader) but it was well worth it.

Nancy warns us that 'there’s a lot of scrimshaw and blubber!' to wade through.

Fiction Fan was fairly scathing, 

My verdict – shows potential in places but requires a severe edit to rid it of all the extraneous nonsense and to improve the narrative flow.

The Bookish Bundle said,

I’ve come to realise that I have a complication relationship with this novel. Some parts of it I loved and thought were superbly conceived and written. Other sections made me despair and wish for an end to what seemed an eternity of boredom.

Katherine is considering rereading Moby-Dick with us (which is a good thing, right?) after reviewing it in 2017,

What I didn’t expect was just how odd of a tapestry this book is. There are adventure bits. There are poetical, metaphysical digressions. There is bawdy humor and Shakespearean soliloquies. And yes, a lot about whales and whaling.

Marianne @Let's Read had this to say earlier this year, 

I was reminded of lessons at school where all I wanted was that this class would be over and the next, more interesting one, would begin.

On a more hopeful note, Louise @A Strong Belief in Wicker alerted me to this wonderful article,
Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times by Philip Hoare in The Guardian this week. Hoare says that,

Not only is it very funny and very subversive, but it maps out the modern world as if Melville had lived his life in the future and was only waiting for us to catch up.

I attempted to start Moby-Dick a number of years ago myself, but I couldn't make it through the first chapter! Trying to go with the flow of Melville's writing didn't work - it just washed right over me and left me numb and bewildered.

To get through this behemoth of a book, I will need all the help I can get - help from my friends and online help. I will not let this book defeat me! Therefore I will be researching the shit out of this (to misquote Matt Damon in The Martian).

According to Nathaniel Philbrick in Why Read Moby-Dick? there a few key points to keep in mind as we read this too long and maddeningly digressive American classic.

• skim the tedious bits
• prepare for digressions and detailed descriptions of whaling
• read some of the sentences out loud
• watch for insights into the American archetypes
• & homo-erotic passages
• note influences from Shakespeare, Hawthorne and the Bible
• read a few of Melville's letters to Hawthorne 
• engage with Melville's intellectual challenge & wit

I will add:

• Use Power Moby-Dick the Online Annotation.
• Listen to the Moby-Dick Big Read.
• Print out my Moby-Dick Google Doc to keep up with your chapters.
• Get social with #MobyDickReadalong
• Add your Moby-Dick posts in the linky below using BLOG NAME (title of post) format.
• Start reading NOW!