A note on the text

Note: entry originally published Friday, 28 December 2007

COMING IN at around six hundred pages, Moby-Dick is a lot of book. I might question the sanity of the person that would want to read this epic tome with me - as I have at several points questioned my own sanity in setting the task for myself - but as a web-diarist (and as a former scholar) I would be remiss not detailing some salient points of the exercise.

I will be reading from the Penguin Classics edition (2003). My edition was printed in the UK - I believe the page numbers of the Vintage edition, published in North America, correlates to the edition I will be reading. I will try to refrain from using page numbers in my entries. Fortunately, Melville himself has made referencing passages from the book a simpler task by numbering and entitling each of the chapters, and, in the fashion of the time, keeping the length of the chapters to a standard of roughly three to five pages each.

THE TEXT used for this edition is an authoratative text, approved by the Center for Editions of American Authors and the Modern Language Association of America. This means that the text at hand is as true to what Melville intended as can me ascertained.

As for my own text, I will try to differentiate between posts that directly address the book and those that talk around the themes or other salient points-of-interest by the use of distinctive fonts. This should all become clearer as I proceed through the book. I also intend to post at least once a week regarding what I have read of the novel. If I come across anything of both interest and pertinance I'll mention these in separate entries.

As for proceeding, I have ascertained - with the help of a swift calculation in long division - that reading just twelve pages a week should get me through Moby-Dick by Christmas, 2008.* I am aiming for three to four chapters a week. At this rate the whole endevour should take about forty weeks; this also gives me a little slippage-time if Life begins to intrude on my project.

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* Having just concluded the first week of July, the page-count-per-week has risen steeply should the intention be to complete the novel before year's end. While I'm not holding myself to any insistance of completing this project by the end of the year, I will be trying to read more than twelve pages in a week.