The 'Moby Dick' reading group

 

The Lagoda in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. (Creative Commons photo).

The next online reading group for this blog will be Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I've hashed out the details with the two folks who have agreed to help me make posts to the blog, Eric Wagner and Oz Fritz, and here are the details. Eric assures me that Robert Anton Wilson was a big fan of the novel. I don't know whether Robert Shea read it, although I suspect he did.

The format will be the usual for online reading groups here (archived at the right side of this page). One of us will do a blog post, and everyone else will be invited to say something in the comments. The schedule for blog posting will be Tom, Eric, Tom, Oz. We'll have a new post every Monday.

The hardest decision was the pace for reading. We compromised on about 35 pages a week (I like a fairly fast pace, Eric likes to proceed slowly, Oz was flexible.) The 135 chapters are pretty short, so this will be several chapters a week in most weeks. I'll figure out an exact reading schedule later on, but I'll be assigning chapters rather than page numbers, to deal with the fact that everyone likely will have different editions, but will try to add up to about 35 pages each time. 

The other decision was when to start; the first post will be Nov. 4. I'll likely do an introductory post, and so the next one will be the first "reading assignment." This should give everyone time to get their hands on a copy.