The Year of the Whale

1.
I once had a professor who would read, every year, the same 10 books. He called them THE TEN. Candide, Siddhartha, Screwtape Letters, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations were regulars; the others he’d swap out after a six- or seven-year run. Taken with this idea, I decided I, too, would do a yearly re-reading. The book would be Moby-Dick, and I would begin it each year on Christmas, the day the Pequod sets sail.

And so I did: 2017, 2018, and 2019. But last year I read it three times. In the winter of 2020, I read it with a student doing an independent study. She told a friend how great  is, and so the following spring he, too, wanted an independent study.  And then, in fall, I ran another independent study on , this time with two students I met just a few months earlier