For the past month, my default view on Bluesky has been the shared feed of a group of strangers all reading Moby Dick. Most people on the list seem to know Jacob Harris, who organized group and ran the feed, but as far as I can tell, that’s the only common connection.

I first tried to read Moby Dick in 2014, for reasons I don’t remember now, but I gave up a third of the way in. The book is too weird, the plot interspersed with tangeants about whales and whaling, missives about individual crew members, parts that read like a play. Very little of the book is the actual quest for revenge that most people know. Ahab had barely arrived when I quit the first time.

Since I started making annual goals, I’ve had a list of books I might read. Moby Dick has been at the top of that list, and every year I’d skip over it for something easier. Yesterday I finished the book.

Moby Dick might be especially well-suited to reading in a group, especially when that group is willing to have fun with it. Herman Melville gets lumped in with the American Literary Greats, and he deserves to be there, but his masterwork is full of silliness and homoeroticism and recipes and side quests. It deserves to both be taken seriously and not.

Having this group as my default feed solved another problem: The internet is a distraction machine. My usual Bluesky view is a news-heavy stream of stress and sadness, especially now. January 2026 has not been a good month in the world.

I check my phone a lot, often for no real reason. Maybe you do, too. Now, instead of finding incremental updates on today’s news, or people offering engagement-bait takes, I’m seeing people talk about the book we’re reading together. Or I’m skipping that loop entirely and opening the Kindle app.

I’m not arguing for news-avoidance here, but defaulting to a book has been a healthier choice for me this month. News is my job, and this is work-life balance.

So, I recommend Moby Dick, and I especially recommend finding a group of friends, online or offline, to read it with. Go ship with Ishmael and Queequeg while you can.