There’s a beautiful new site dedicated to the massively-worthwhile project of making lie of the claim that Moby Dick is ‘the great unread American novel’. The Moby-Dick Big Read is ‘an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible’. It’s only up to chapter 13, so not too late to jump on board, or you can access the book via the iTunes or Podcast feed. There’s never a wrong time to read or to re-read Moby Dick.
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jasongoroncy.com 
Well, I’ve started Moby Dick twice now…the second time as a result of someone enthusing about it on Twitter…and I got even less far the second time than the first. It starts SO well, but then when Ahab finally appears (after a tremendously long build-up) he talks as though he’s walked out of a Shakespeare play, and to emphasize it further, Melville presents some of the chapters as dialogue from a play. There are some wonderful things in it, but it seems to me there are some patches that are just plain awful. Will I try it again before I die? Maybe…
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