'Moby Dick' reading group begins

 

Cover of the Standard Ebooks version of Moby Dick. Get your free ebook here. 

Welcome to the Moby Dick online reading group! Eric Wagner assures us that Robert Anton Wilson loved Moby Dick, and indeed, when I recently re-read Cosmic Trigger 2, a book I've read again and again, I was surprised by how often RAW talked about the book. If you were going to pick a "Great American Novel," I think many people would go with Moby Dick. 

Moby Dick should be pretty widely available as a library book, as a cheap paperback, as an ebook and in pretty much any format you can think of. Here's a free audiobook, from Librivox. (There are actually two versions on the site, with another featuring different readers).

We're going to do this the way that online reading groups at this site have always worked: There will be a blog post, and then everyone else will get to weigh in using the comments. Unfortunately, I have to moderate the comments to avoid spam, but under normal circumstances, I check several times a day. Moby Dick has many chapters, and the reading assignments will be for chapters, not page numbers, so that everyone can easily follow along, no matter which edition you use. 

My co-hosts for the reading group are Eric Wagner, the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, and Oz Fritz, the Grammy-award winner recording engineer recently spotted penning the introduction for the just-published Hilaritas Press edition of Terra II by Timothy Leary, which I bought this weekend. The schedule will be Tom, Eric, Tom and Oz, unless somebody needs to switch out, or wants to change the schedule to cover a favorite passage. The three of us agreed to do about 35 written pages a week, a pace I think most people will be able to manage. We'll post every Monday.

Reading assignment for next Monday: Please read the Etymology, the Extracts, and Chapters 1-3 ("Loomings," "The Carpet Bag," "The Spouter-Inn.")