www.annemoore.net

 

 

 

 

 

Reading Pythonga, 2015

A friend heading to the Galapagos Islands asked my advice for a breezy read, a light but engaging page-turner. Not my kind of read, but I scanned my shelves: Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, John Kenney’s Truth in Advertising. Not light but certainly engaging, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply.

What is my kind of read? Big long books that keep me company for days, books like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch or Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.

IMG_1623You’ll laugh, but my latest big book read is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or the Whale, which I somehow missed as an English major. No regrets: it’s a long, rich read that deserves an adult consumer.

Why now? I saw a stage rendition — really — that was so impressive I had to hoist the 824 page book and bring it with me to my favorite reading spot, Lac Pythonga, in Quebec.

A wise choice, as I had long hours of uninterrupted reading sitting on the dock, in a boat, on a screened porch. Its subject is whaling in general and the hunt for the great white whale Moby Dick, in particular, which will be the crews’ undoing.

Its pleasures come not only from the relentless plot; it is Melville’s writing that entices, and puts him in league with Whitman. Here, the Pequod reaches the Pacific Ocean: “When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.”

If you haven’t read, do. But give yourself space and time to absorb this full-bodied American tale.

Also in the blog

Books: Paul Auster’s Sunset Park

More book grief! Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park” grabbed me from its first sentence. “For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things.” He is Miles Heller, an Ivy League drop-out working foreclosures in Florida, inspecting abandoned homes for banks. He finds himself cataloguing, via photographs, the things people have left behind:

(...)

Reading Pythonga: Part 2

Do we save “big reads” for summer? More and more, I do. There’s more unbroken time, whether its outside on a cushy chaise in my Chicago backyard or on the dock/at the beach/in the boat at Lac Pythonga. Why more time? Simpler summer food at home and, at Pythonga, all meals come from the club.

(...)

2020 reading, watching

It’s the end of 2020! Goodbye, good riddance.  Two — no, three — nice things happened before lockdown in March. First, I turned 60 in January and had a fun dance party with friends and family. That would be the last carefree time of the year. At the end of January, we got a puppy.

(...)

5 thoughts on "Reading Pythonga, 2015"