Whale of a time How Moby-Dick marathons became American tradition

Every autumn on Venice beach, locals set up a chair by the water. A harpoon goes on one side, a whalebone on the other. Then, in honor of grey whale migration season, they spend two days reading Moby-Dick aloud.

- Lois Beckett

Nearly 200 years after Herman Melville first published the story of a sea captain's obsessive hunt for a white whale, Moby-Dick marathons have become a surprisingly popular American tradition. There are an estimated 25 or more across the US each year, in locations ranging from museums to a 19th-century whaling ship.

"There aren't many books that generate this kind of interest, intensity and devotion," said Samuel Otter, a Melville scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Part of the appeal of the communal readings, Otter said, is the "stamina" they require.

The Venice beach marathon, held for 29 years, is particularly surreal. Even in late November, the beach is crowded: tourists on bicycles, the bodybuilders of Muscle beach lifting weights, friends playing volleyball in short shorts. Far out on the sand, the Moby-Dick readers sit in a circle, switching readers every chapter, as tourists and surfers eddy around them, drifting up to take photographs and then drifting away again. Occasionally, readers spot whales in the distance.

On a Sunday afternoon this November, a surfer in a damp wetsuit sat in the centre of the circle, reading aloud Melville's descriptions of whale flesh, like "plum pudding... a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson".

Erin Darling, 43, had been out on the waves with his board earlier that day, then wandered up to the Moby-Dick circle. It was his first time reading aloud from the novel, Darling said, explaining: "I've been before and been too timid."