Got a group of lit-minded friends who love whaling? Why not join the Moby Dick Big Read?

And if you need a soundtrack for your reading, you could always go with the new Philip Glass production.

Unfortunately, you can't go around digging through the archives of Kim Video for any good listening.

But you could always try repurposing your current collection into works of art.

And if you have to do so in the buff, more power to you.

In fact, you'd be riding a bit of a literary trend, should you have the inclination.

Even then, you wouldn't be embroiled in as much controversy as Salman Rushdie at the moment.

So you can relax and wander the streets of Melbourne, looking for a good book to pick up.

Image source

Do you love reading but sometimes wish it were a little more social and a little less taxing on the wrists? Don't fret; just do a Big Read. There was Infinite Summer, when thousands of people read Infinite Jest, and Conversational Reading did a Big Read of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai in 2010. And the latest, best Big Read is happening right now: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is starting a new life as a podcast. That means the dulcet voices of Stephen Fry, David Cameron, Tilda Swinton, and Simon Callow are all mainlining Melville’s words straight to your ears.

Feel like rising to Ahab's challenge? Here’s how you do it, in seven easy steps!

1. Accept & forgive your decades of Moby-Dick avoidance
“I’ve got too many other books.” “I wasn't that into Bartleby the Scrivener.” “I still hate my high-school American Lit teacher.” Or maybe you took that one English class pass/fail and realized that maybe you could pass without cracking that spine. One way or another, Moby-Dick got beached on your bookshelf. Perfect.

2. See a friend reading it and think seriously about picking it up
Maybe you just came off the heels of a terrible airplane novel and suddenly Melville doesn’t seem so terrible. Maybe you just want to sleep with that boy/girl with the oversized glasses and you need a reason to strike up a conversation. But don’t start the book yet. Baby steps.

3. Learn that Moby-Dick podcasts are happening and that David Attenborough and Benedict Cumberbatch are reading chapters
Read that again: David Attenborough. The dude narrated Planet Earth. Hell, he could read the chapters classifying different whales and have us riveted. Begin seriously considering reading the damn book.

4. Download the first podcast. Then the second. Then the third...
Okay, you’re committing to this. Just listen to Tilda Swinton intoning “Call me Ishmael.” Start out amused, quickly become addicted.

5. Get to Chapter 32 and briefly consider cancelling your internet service
Do whales actually have to be classified by size? Why are you listening to these overly detailed descriptions? Is this book even worth listening to? Ah, but herein lies the beauty of the Big Read: get on Twitter and ask everybody if you really need to keep going. Hear from various sources that yes, really, you should stick with it (and even finish the cetology chapter). Regain your belief that there's method to Melville’s mammalian madness.

6. Kill the White Whale
Four months and one hundred and thirty-five podcasts later, realize that you somehow did it. You read Moby-Dick. Wasn't it better than that terrible airplane novel? Did you hook up with the glasses-wearing friend? Who cares — this is one serious book crossed off your Lifetime Reading list. If you still have an apartment, pop a bottle of Champagne and toast your tenacity.

7. Go hunt another Big Read
Well? Did you think you were done? Look at your bookshelves. (You may take the bottle with you.) The Iliad is actually pretty awesome. And War and Peace’s two epilogues aren’t going to read themselves. Take a deep breath and pick one.

Go on, get cracking.

image credit: ocburbs.blogspot.com

Mid-May through end of June, graduation presents are flung to young people like so many palm fronds under asses’ feet. It's been a while since I've had a successful encounter with an institution of booklearnin', but I remember getting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I finished high school. Never mind that subsequent studies disinclined me to take Pirsig seriously; I read his book when I got it and dreamt of cycling across the plains with nothing but a tent and my meager late-teenage wits.

People like to wrap books up for grads. There's something about it that’s less crass than a sappy card padded with cash or stiffened with an Applebee's gift card. Books enrich, even if they were purchased off a display table with a GIFTS FOR GRADS placard on it. And booksellers love to promote graduation books: they’re part of a spring giving trifecta, along with Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, that gives a major boost to sales. Way back in ’97, Publishers Weekly noted that this growing “holiday-ization” of book sales—employed mostly by chains, but also by your beloved indies—had helped make May and June the best sales months behind the Christmas season.

Which is only natural. We purchase because we love, y’know.

Now, fifteen years after the industry woke up to its own practices, bookshops are bursting with that vanilla version of graduation gifting, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Dr. Suess's book is supposed to be whimsical, apt, indicative. This cynic doesn’t much think OTPYG is much of the latter two, but it does jiggle with whimsy. And cliché. Because (some) folks take graduation as a cultural milestone that suggests a future wide open with potential greatness and achievement. It’s a token way of saying, "You're destined for great things!" And all the while it affirms the aspirations of a generation of egotists assured they will get exactly what they want, cuz they deserve it. (Never mind if we’re all that way from eighteen to twenty-two.)

But let’s talk about the grad on your list. Let’s say you want to let them know that you actually have given some thought to the unique qualities that make them a human being, qualities that will deepen over the course of their life and make them as pleasant and savory as pi dan. In that case, get them a book that fits with those traits! Not one that was intended for five year olds!

If you haven’t given thought to your giftee's unique qualities, don’t despair. The trick is to not aim at producing easy happiness or honing in on whatever they’re enthusiastic about this year; that shit fades. Instead, giveMiddlemarch. Or Moby-Dick. By the time they get around to reading your book (if they ever do), its emotional complexity and portrayal of life's twisted course will make the sweetest sort of sense it can—that it doesn’t have to.

And in the interim, the book's spine will make your loved one look that much more intelligent whenever their houseguests are looking for the bathroom.

Image: flickr user David Bivins

"‘This is an historic day,’ Kerr said. ‘For the first time in our nation's history, a federal court heard arguments as to whether living, breathing, feeling beings have rights and can be enslaved simply because they happen to not have been born human.’ …. [Sea World attorney] Shaw warned the ruling would have profound implications … ‘We're talking about hell unleashed,’ he said.” —CBS News, February 7, 2012, reporting on PETA attorney Jeffrey Kerr and his 13th amendment lawsuit on behalf of five killer whales

“Dr. Navarre refers, in his work on excommunication, to a case in which anathemas were fulminated against certain large sea-creatures called terones, which infested the waters of Sorrento and destroyed the nets of the fishermen. He speaks of them as ‘fish or caco-demons’… and maintains that they are subject to anathematization not as fish, but only as devils.” —from E.P. Evans' 1906 study Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials

“…as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.” —Ishmael, in Moby Dick (1851); part of this passage is cited in D. Graham Burnett’s new book The Sounding of the Whale

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Autocowrecks