Melville, and especially his masterwork Moby Dick, can induce eyeball-rolling in students, imagining an unreadable and unfathomably long homework assignment. But if you haven’t read him since high school, please read him again, maybe even aloud.

I recently re-read Moby Dick as a way to put my infant daughter to sleep at night. She just needed to hear someone’s voice, and Shel Silverstein was getting boring. Reading Moby Dick aloud made it an entirely different experience, vastly better than silently, and makes me wonder if Melville wasn’t considering oral story telling as he wrote. The long, dense sentences and complex vocabularly actually make sense and flow wonderfully aloud. Just a crackpot theory of mine with no evidence to back it up. However, there was a one-man show happening for a while in Brooklyn, re-enacting the preacher chapter, which suggests others see the oral power of Melville.

For another side of Melville, read Omoo. One of Melville’s pre-Moby Dick “romances”, Omoo was more popular in Melville’s time but nowadays is less read. Though less complex and metaphorical than Moby Dick, Omoo oozes irony and sarcasm in a very modern way, making the book seem far ahead of its time, and much more approachable than Melville’s later work.

Alas, my daughter is two now, and she can understand what we read. She seems less interested in Melville. Our favorite book now is “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie“, which also reads aloud quite well.