Recs if you like Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them...

books that engage with water as a way to explore migration, multispecies kinship, race, capitalism, transatlantic slavery, and more. stories that take place in, on, or around the water. coastlines, swamps, rivers, maritime histories, and the oceanic.

This list is made possible by all the 🫛🐝’ers who came through for me during a terrible breakup. I asked the club for joyful nonfiction recs because fiction is too emotionally fraught for what I’m going through.

I hope these books can bring you some hope, relief, or perspective. Together, we can get through this 😊

Every book or author mentioned in Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being” in one convenient place

A list to deepen one’s understanding of cross-literary conversation from a 21st century author.

I created this list in the spirit of one of the central themes of the novel, that being that literature is a conversation through space and time. Writing is a kind of time travel, if only just to the future, and reading is one to the past.

A whale of a rabbit trail

(nonfiction about whales, whaling, Herman Melville, the American Renaissance, colonialism, Indigenous and queer representation in American literature, and other questions raised in Moby-Dick)

Looking for fiction? Check out my list Moby-Dick Redux.