Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — I joined hundreds of other people at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Moby-Dick Marathon, a collaborative and continuous twenty-five-hour reading of Herman Melville’s opus, held yearly since 1997. The reading began in a tall, bright gallery containing a half-size replica whaling ship, abuzz and overflowing with people — clustered around the hull, squeezed onto the deck, and perched on the balcony for a view through the rigging.

“Call me Ishmael.” A cheer went up, and we were underway.

“The idea started with a docent named Irwin Marks,” said whaling museum director Amanda McMullen, describing the origins of the marathon. “He had seen a summer Moby-Dick readathon happening at Mystic Seaport [Museum] and decided that New Bedford should be doing that because of where the story begins.” It has become a local institution: the mayor of New Bedford reads every year, and Massachusetts senator (and Green New Deal champion) Ed Markey was a reader in 2020.