‘People are rooting for the whale’: the strange American tradition of Moby-Dick reading marathons

When I went off to college to be an English major, my father (who passed last December at 90) told me a story about how his respected professor at Northwestern University spent a whole lecture on the seven levels of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Being of an analytical mind and precise mind, my father copied all her points into his notebook, while his classmates read the paper and passed notes.

“When I got to the final exam,” my father said, “guess what question I saw? ‘What are the seven levels of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick?'”

I rarely give traditional exams, but when I do, I’m more likely to present students with an excerpt from a work I never went over in lecture, asking them to demonstrate their close-reading textual analysis skills, rather than asking them to spit back the contents of my lectures.

I’ve been working casually through Moby-Dick. Short chapters with compounding digressions are diverting when I need to occupy my brain while driving or doing something else routine. I drew on some details from this book when I used to narrate an epic, years-long interactive steampunk bedtime adventure with my kids, so returning to this book has unlocked more memories of those days.

Enjoy the wonderful writing in this UK story on the weird American custom of Moby-Dick reading marathons.

I’ve already taught the last class in a course on creative nonfiction writing, and I wish I had seen this article so I could have worked it into the class.

This is a wonderful example of a writer telling an engaging story that relies, not just on whatever the writer can imagine, but on real-world sensory details, newsworthy contextual details., and direct quotes from participants, witnesses and experts.

Author Lois Beckett makes each paragraph into a well-crafted masterpiece. She includes details and background only when necessary to engage the reader; she never interrupts her original storytelling for a wordcount-boosting infodump that could have been copied from a marketing brochure or churned out in seconds by a bot. 

The reporter never says “I noticed,” does not echo the samey-samey marketing language (amazing, impactful, blending, leverage, seamless, dynamic) that overwhelms actual human creativity on the internet, and does not, like an omniscient narrator, churn out lists of what a source “feels/thinks/believes.” 

Take a look at how this writer sets the scene for a marathon reading of the novel Moby-Dick.

“There aren’t many books that generate this kind of interest, intensity and devotion,” said Samuel Otter, a Melville scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Part of the appeal of the communal readings, Otter said, is the “stamina” they require.

The Venice beach marathon, held for 29 years, is a particularly surreal scene. Even in late November, the beach is crowded: French tourists on bicycles, the men of Muscle beach lifting weights, friends playing volleyball in short shorts. Far out on the sand, where the air begins to smell more like salt than weed or essential oils, the Moby-Dick readers sit in a circle, switching readers every chapter, as tourists and surfers eddy around them, drifting up to take photographs and then drifting away again. Occasionally, readers spot whales in the distance. —Guardian

Note that she cleverly describes the crowd with beach-related words like “eddy” and “drifting.” After giving us details by the boatload (see what I did there) the paragraph ends on a high note with a splash. 

The paragraph SHOWS us details about people who have turned up smelling of weed and essential oils for a marathon reading of a book where the titular whale first appears in chapter 133. We do not need to be TOLD how these folks will react when they actually see a whale.