From Thursday, March 26 to Friday, March 27, students camped out in Upper Tarble to complete Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” from start to finish. After months of organizing, 63 students, faculty, and community members traded off reading chapters, taking a total of 23-and-a-half hours.
Seniors Hope Dworkin, Sally Rogers, and Sam Moreland (all ’26) spearheaded the campaign, with guidance from Professor of English Literature Lara Cohen. Dworkin and Rogers took Cohen’s Old Friends course in the fall, in which they spent two months reading Moby Dick. While in the class, Dworkin was inspired by a YouTube video of a Moby Dick Readathon and brought it up with their professor.
Cohen admits she was skeptical at first. “At first I laughed it off because the only Moby-Dick readathons I knew of had been held by major cultural institutions like the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the [South Street Seaport Museum] in Philadelphia. But then I realized that the outlandishness of holding a Moby-Dick readathon at Swarthmore was exactly its genius.”
Left to right: Rogers, Dworkin, Cohen, and Moreland together in Upper Tarble with their many copies of Moby Dick on hand. Phoenix Photo/Ellen Stewart.
By February, Dworkin, Rogers, and Moreland had been recruited to organize the readathon, attending weekly meetings to gather interest, reserve rooms, and discuss the logistics of hosting a 24-hour event on campus. Cohen noted that it was difficult to get approval to hold the event overnight. However, the most intensive process seemed to be assigning all 60+ readers their chapters and letting them know when to show up to read.
Dworkin described the tedious process of creating what they dubbed their “best Google Sheet ever.” They based most of their calculations off of the Moby Dick audiobook, adjusting for anticipated faster reading speeds. Then, they automated a Google Sheet to assign each reader a chapter of their preferred length and in their preferred time slot. Dworkin then manually emailed all of the readers their assignments.
When Thursday at 8 p.m. rolled around, the organizers were prepared to begin the readathon, armed with custom stickers, fish-themed snacks, and dozens of copies of Moby Dick. And ten pounds of oyster crackers.
By Friday at 6:30 p.m., they had succeeded. Dworkin, Rogers, Moreland, and Cohen concluded the event by reading the final four chapters of the novel, where the Pequod is engaged in a chase to the death with the white whale.
All three seniors noted that the stretch of the night from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. was the most difficult, with five students, including the organizers, opting to sleep over in Upper Tarble to continue reading. Rogers explained her least favorite moment was “probably around the 3:30 mark, [when she was] trying to sleep and not able to, and knowing that [she] was gonna have to be up in like another two hours to finish.”
Dworkin and Moreland agreed, with Moreland noting how hard it was to wake up at 6 a.m. and realizing that they still had twelve hours to go.
However, the event had its highs as well.
Rogers was excited to read her favorite chapter, “The Grand Armada,” among five other chapters she read throughout the night. The other two seniors highlighted the spirited ending of the event, with the fast-paced chase scene and post-reading celebration.
Cohen recalled the pull of the readathon: “It was glorious. It cast a weird spell; I had to leave for a while on Friday to go to a faculty meeting, and I was so happy to return. Like the whale, Upper Tarble could ‘live in this world without being of it.’”
She added, “I loved seeing people I knew from various areas of the college there, and even more I loved seeing people I didn’t know at all.”
While not the primary focus of the event, readers were treated to a variety of oceanic snacks to fuel their reading. Moreland, a self-proclaimed “big fan of a dry, tasty cracker,” enjoyed the oyster crackers, which were meant to replicate authentic hardtack. Cohen baked and decorated whale-shaped cookies. The highlight was a ginger cake, baked by Georgie Greene ’26, which Cohen notes is in reference to the “tepid ginger and water” handed to Queequeg after he harvests a dead whale’s blubber while balancing on its floating body as sharks snap at it.”
In reflecting on the event, the organizers agreed that the readathon had met its goals.
Dworkin noted they “thought of two measures of success before it happened, which [were that] people [showed] up and read and [were] having fun and [were] engaged, which seemed to be true. And then, that I [didn’t] hate Moby Dick by the end of it. And both of those were good. I don’t hate Moby Dick now. I mean, I never did, but I was worried.”
Cohen was so inspired that she has signed up to teach a course centered around Moby Dick, which will culminate in a readathon each time it is run, hopefully making the event an annual tradition. While the student organizers are all graduating this spring, they did mention that, given the chance, they would do it all over again.
