Books about whales and wellness
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Well, I did it. I read the great American novel! I read it via Whale Weekly, a newsletter that sent out updates in "real time" along with the ill-fated Pequod's two-year journey (so yes, I've been reading it for more than two years). I can't imagine trying to speed-read this for a literature class; you're supposed to immerse yourself in it like soup, spending years upon years watching the ill omens pile up, knowing that nothing can be done to thwart the final destination of Ahab and his obsession with the white whale.
I knew the book was long, but I wasn't expecting it to be so funny. Our narrator, Ishmael, has a wicked sense of humor and an ADHD way of explaining things, full of wordplay and allusions. There are chapters that are the equivalent of a BuzzFeed article that's like "Every Whale: Rated." There are chapters pontificating about the existential terror of the color white. There are chapters explaining the details of whaling in what appears to be a completely normal way, only for Ishmael to wallop you with a THIS WAS A METAPHOR ALL ALONG! at the very end. There are chapters where Ishmael tells you not to turn the white whale into a metaphor. There are chapters where he implies the whale is nothing but a metaphor. There are antiracist messages so heavily based in the understandings of race at the time that Ishmael is using phrenology to explain that Queequeg has an amazing skull shape, actually. The two main characters are canonically gay-married. There are sermons and soliloquies. At one point it turns into a play, written in script format. It is a trip and I loved it.
Live Nourished: Make Peace with Food, Banish Body Shame, and Reclaim Joy by Shana Minei Spence
A good introduction to intuitive eating and a joyful relationship with food. It wasn't my favorite book on the topic because it didn't go super in depth, but it was still motivating and interesting!
Previously on What I've Been Reading:
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