Please Happy

I’ve purchased Moby Dick two times for myself, four if you count the unabridged CDs I listened to on a college road trip to the NCAA women’s ice hockey championships, and given it as a gift once (the recipient has yet to finish it).

Maybe it’s the comedy, the way Melville seems to make up his own language, the squeamish trance I felt while reading about men literally swimming in the warm spermaceti of the massive mammal or just the sheer research it took to make such a massive book, but I soon became as obsessed as my 19th Century American lit professor Pete Coviello had promised.

And, wandering the streets of damp drizzly Berlin, I felt compelled to buy another copy. I’m taking the tome with me to my two week retreat (where I will have nothing that plugs in).

Moby Dick is to me as the sea is to Ishmael.

I took this photograph of the hole left by Moby Dick on the English fiction shelf. I would say On the Road is a worthy neighbor to Melville’s masterpiece, but Unleash the Night? Haven’t read it, but I’d say that Queequeg could totally take the blue-eyed front cover Fabio. They’d wrestle, shirts off, on the head of a newly dead whale, and then Queequeg would likely toss Fabio into the vast milky Tun and wait until he was good and submerged before plunging in after him to deliver his Fabio foe – held by the hair – to safety.

If that doesn’t convince you, I just learned that Esquire lists MD as one of the Greatest 75 Books Every Man Should Read. I’m working on the list for women.