defective yeti is doing NaNoReMo: National Novel READING Month, blogging about his reading of Moby Dick every day for the month of November. and in typical style, it is hiLARious.
“Let’s go grab some lunch,” you propose to a co-worker.
“Yeah, that sounds good,” she replies. “Where do you want to go?”
“Oh, anywhere is fine. What do you feel like?”
“I don’t care, I like everything.” She ducks her head into another person’s cubicle. “Hey, Carolyn, we’re going to lunch. Do you wanna come?”
Fast-forward seventy minutes. You’re standing in the reception area of your office, and your “lunch party” now contains enough of your colleagues to form two rugby teams. You’re not even sure who you are waiting for, though you occasionally see people wander off toward the restrooms, or back to their PCs to check their email “one last time” before you depart. You still haven’t settled on a destination. Your stomach has begun digesting its own lining out of desperation.
This is how Moby-Dick is making me feel.
At least we’ve gotten to the ship. But it has yet to sail. And as Chapter 21 is entitled “Going Aboard,” I’m guessing it’s going to remain moored for another score of pages at the minimum.
Much of the last seven chapters was devoted to the burgeoning friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg. Having shared a bed the night they met, the two are now shacking up at every opportunity, though – and I cannot stress this enough – in a completely non-homoerotic way. I say that for the benefit of any school superintendents reading this, who would ban this book from their library in a heartbeat if they knew that, so far, the novel has been much more Brokeback than Humpback.