Friends of Montclair Library

“The Tepid Tears of Moby-Dick” print by Angela Cockayne, a fundraiser for Whale & Dolphin Conservation

Today is the 161st anniversary of the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or, The White Whale. While the book debuted to mixed or even negative reviews, today it’s considered a classic, and you can find several versions of it in the Montclair library’s Classics section, or as an e-book.

Or click on over to the Moby-Dick Big Read to hear “each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.”

For a different take on the story, check out Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel by Sena Jeter Naslund.

Poet and novelist Vikram Seth will be giving a free lecture tonight (10/15/12) at 6pm at UC Berkeley’s International House. The event is open to the public. For more information, see the I-House website or contact townsend_center@ls.berkeley.edu, 510-643-9670.

Seth’s first novel, The Golden Gate, is “composed entirely of rhyming tentrameter sonnets–690 of them to be precise–a satirical romance describing the stories of young professionals in San Francisco throughout their quests and questions to find, then deal with, love in their own lives as well as each others’,” according to his Emory University bio.

Other books by Seth in the Montclair library include the biography Two Lives, the novel An Equal Music, the travelogue From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet, and the poetry Three Chinese Poets: Translations of Poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu.

Elsewhere in the OPL system, you’ll find works like A Suitable Boy, his award-winning 1474-page epic novel of Indian life set in the 1950s, and the children’s book Arion and the Dolphin.