Fun

A few years ago, my siblings and I initiated the inaugural Bonomo Book Club. We were embarking on an international endeavor—my oldest brother, John, lives in London; my other brother, Michael, lives in Cleveland; my sister, Christine, lives in Washington, DC; and I live in Los Angeles. So we kept our expectations at a minimum. We didn’t set any strict deadlines for finishing the books, nor did we develop a method for selecting what to read next. We simply wanted to create a shared experience between us, a way to become closer despite the thousands of miles that kept us apart.

We got off to a rocky start. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood was short but perhaps a little too obtuse for “pleasure reading.” My brother Michael in Cleveland decided to drop out before the next book. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, admittedly my pick, was longer and also certainly not for everyone, particularly my brother John in London. But the three of us charged ahead. And we seemed to hit our stride with The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. As three graduates of Kenyon College who grew up attending countless Indians games, we each related to the novel’s setting on the campus of a small liberal arts college and to the protagonist’s passion for baseball. Although I was intrigued by Harbach’s numerous allusions to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the epic American novel about whale fishery was nowhere near the top of my list of books to read. But John, as oldest brothers are wont to do, went rogue. While my sister and I were finishing The Art of Fielding, he jumped right on board the Pequod. And just like when we were little, Christine and I were quick to follow his lead.

Reading Moby-Dick over the next eight months taught me more about whales than I ever wanted to know. Types of whales, parts of whales, the color of whales, men who hunt whales, whales who hunt men, and so on. It’s fair to say, I didn’t enjoy reading the novel. Nor did I really understand it. Our book club WhatsApp chat—aptly dubbed “Lost at Sea” by Christine—was primarily filled with messages counting down to the end of the book.

Still, while Moby Dick continuously eluded Captain Ahab, Melville managed to keep me hooked. By Chapter 104—when the narrator claims, “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”—I was on the same wavelength as the whalers. I thought to myself, “No, you can’t write a 625-page novel about a flea!” Just as Captain Ahab was obsessed with the whale Moby Dick, and Melville was likely obsessed with writing Moby-Dick, somewhere along the way, I became obsessed too.

The following October, nearly a year after I first read the words “Call me Ishmael,” I looked at a pile of cardboard boxes and saw the makings of a mighty costume. Though my family couldn’t quite see my vision at first, I spent the next few weeks collecting enough paper and tape to construct my very own leviathan. I would have loved to have debuted my costume at a party also attended by my siblings. But, alas, Halloween isn’t a holiday that inspires many families, mine included, to travel. So I settled for sending a pic to them via WhatsApp instead. And as I hit send, I finally realized why I had become so enamored with the white whale. According to legend, Moby Dick was “ubiquitous”—the whale “had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.” Cloaked in this ridiculous costume, I had acquired a reciprocal power. John was still in London. Michael was still in Cleveland. Christine was still in Washington, DC. And I was still in Los Angeles. Yet, despite being in opposite latitudes, we were together, at one and the same instant of time.