Douglass Read-A-Thon POSTPONED

The Frederick Douglass Read-A-Thon, scheduled for tomorrow (2/10/13), has been postponed to Sunday, March 3.

Same time (2-6 P.M.), same location (Friends Meeting House, 83 Spring St., New Bedford).

Apologies for the last-minute notice.

...proceed to put on lasting record

photo: happykatie

The Moby-Dick Big Read has concluded. After posting a chapter each day since September, all 136 chapters are now available for free download as MP3 files. The complete reading will take about 2.5 GB on your iPod. Grab them now — there's no telling how long they'll be up.

The readings range from adequate (Does a life at sea really reduce one's voice to a Tom Waits growl? Ahab impersonators seem to think so.) to entertaining to incantatory.

Readers include M-D-related authors (Nathaniel Philbrick, Andrew Delbanco), Masterpiece-Theatre-caliber actors (Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch), and the odd UK Prime Minister.

Apparently, many of the readers are well-known in the UK. This blog by M-D virgin and reader-with-lovely-accent, Eva Stalker, gives the credentials of most of them.

If you listen to just one...

One reading stood out for me, for its inspired match of reader and text. Chapter 105, Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? — Will He Perish?, is read by veteran natural-history documentarian David Attenborough. His voice and delivery are immediately recognizable, and make our time-honored text as fresh as this week's installment of Nature.