Read Moby-Dick by email.
You have started this book before. This time you will finish it.
Call me Ishmael. A restless schoolmaster ships aboard the Pequod under Captain Ahab, who has sworn vengeance on the white whale that took his leg — Melville’s vast, funny, obsessive epic of the sea and everything in it.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
A year from now, you will have read Melville.
375 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1851
- Installments
- 375
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 205,810
- Reading time
- 14 hours 18 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 5.5 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 3 months
- At 20 minutes a day
- 6 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Moby-Dick?
The great American novel that America ignored for seventy years. Moby-Dick sold poorly, baffled reviewers, and was out of print when Melville died; the twentieth century picked it up and found the most ambitious book the country had produced — a revenge tragedy, a comedy of shipboard manners, an encyclopedia of whales, and a metaphysical duel with the universe, all in the same binding.
It is a book built of short chapters — 135 of them, few longer than a sitting — which makes it almost suspiciously well suited to email. One day you get Ishmael sharing a bed with a tattooed cannibal; another, Ahab nailing a gold doubloon to the mast; another, a two-minute chapter of pure storm. Melville even writes several chapters as stage-play scenes, speaker labels and all. The variety that disorients readers holding all 700 pages at once is exactly what makes the daily installment such a pleasure.
Installment 1 opens with Melville’s dedication of the book to Nathaniel Hawthorne, then the most famous first sentence in American literature. From there: New Bedford, Queequeg, the Pequod, and the long hunt — every installment topped with a one-line recap of the day before, so the White Whale never gets lost in the mail.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Moby-Dick?
About fourteen hours straight through (205,810 words). By email, it’s 375 daily installments of two to three minutes — just over a year with the whale, or considerably faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — Melville’s full 1851 text in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including the cetology chapters, the stage-play chapters, and the Epilogue. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
What about the “Etymology” and “Extracts” sections?
Melville prefaced the novel with a mock-scholarly etymology of the word “whale” and about eighty pages-worth of whale quotations “supplied by a sub-sub-librarian.” They’re a bibliography played for laughs, not part of the story, so the serialization begins at Chapter I — “Call me Ishmael.” (The dedication to Hawthorne is kept, at the top of installment 1.)
Isn’t Moby-Dick famously difficult?
It’s famously long, which isn’t the same thing. Chapter by chapter it is one of the most entertaining books in the language — funny, gory, gossipy, and strange. The usual failure mode is trying to swallow it whole. At one short chapter-sized piece a day, the parts everyone warns you about become the parts you look forward to.
Do I really get the whaling-encyclopedia chapters too?
You do — that’s the book. Melville alternates the Ahab story with chapters on whale anatomy, whale paintings, and the price of whale oil, and the rhythm between story and digression is deliberate. Two minutes on the sperm whale’s forehead lands differently when it arrives between two days of hunting it.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
No. Each recap covers only the previous installment — the prophecies, the fate of the Pequod, and who survives stay unspoken until Melville gets there.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.