~Post by Jenn S.
This week, the Required Reading Revisited book club has picked us a doozy: a little American novel called Moby Dick. If you haven’t read it, well, it’s about this whale. Actually, here’s a five-second retelling (spoiler alert!): man meets whale; man hunts whale; whale kills man. Congratulations, you just read Moby Dick! Now you are fully qualified to be an English professor. Pat yourself on the back.
Herman Melville’s tome is about courage. It’s about the attractive nature of evil. It’s about obsession. It’s about hunting. It’s about a bunch of dudes hanging out on a boat for a really long time, and so mostly it’s about homosocial activity. It is at times hilarious, and at other times deathly boring, and if you ask the experts, that’s the point. If you ask me, Melville, you’re a great and messed up writer, like all the best, but dude needed an editor. Where was Gordon Lish when we really needed him?
And so, if you don’t have time to make it through all 635 pages by Sunday, never fear! Because fear is for cowards! Reading a book is not nearly as scary as whale hunting, fact. And because you have options! Kester, who will be attending his LAST bookclub meeting EVER this week, told us we could read any edition of the book we want. Many versions have been abridged, out of mercy. But any edition? Got me thinking…
- Try the Moby Dick audiobook! Who doesn’t like being read to? Read by William Hootkins, this is the version that I “read” when the books was on my reading list in college. I was on a boat, so I brought my little Discman and schlepped all twenty discs out to sea. I mean, out into the middle of a landlocked lake in Wisconsin. The great thing about the audiobook method? You can skip all the really gory whale hunting chapters with the press of a button. The downside? If you load it into your iTunes, like I eventually did, it can really ruin a solid party shuffle.
- Can’t read and hate listening? No problem! Matt Kish has rendered Moby Dick in Pictures, an extremely gorgeous graphic version. Kish drew one image based on one page of text per day for eighteen months. That’s commitment.
- And finally, if you don’t have time to read it and you’re also morally opposed to whale hunting, just go rent Free Willy. I think it’s pretty much equivalent.
Great. Now that we all have our own versions of Moby Dick to read, I’ll see you Sunday, July 8 at 2pm. And don’t forget to read next month’s much shorter selection: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (wherein I take over the book club and convince everyone to come in costume…).
Required Reading Revisited is the second Sunday of every month, check our website for details.
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