Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick is the book most readers own and never finish, and the reason is almost always the same one: they meet it all at once. This takes it the only way it really goes down, one chapter a day for a hundred and thirty-six days, starting with the Extracts and ending on the third day of the chase. His chapters are short, most of them under ten minutes. Ishmael in New Bedford, Queequeg, Father Mapple in his pulpit, the oath on the quarter-deck, the whiteness of the whale, the try-works burning at midnight, the doubloon, the typhoon. Nothing is abridged and nothing is skipped, cetology included, because the ending does not land without it. The cohort finishes on the first of August, Melville's birthday, the day The Daily Canon reads Moby-Dick.

Read one big book alongside other readers, a day at a time. Cohorts set off on the date above.