Moby Dick

A few years ago I had a friend who started to read Moby Dick while he was staying or living by the beach. When he came back to Utah, he could never bring himself to read it again despite trying. I thought that was cool because for him it was being by the water that made reading the book meaningful. It wasn't about finishing the book.

I was sort of envious of his ability to really live in the moment. I like to think that I live that way too, but in the case of reading I'm the type of person that when only assigned certain chapters of a textbook for class feels so guilty for skipping the others that I usually try to read them too.

Then the other day I was telling the HB about the book Elizabeth. About how Queen Elizabeth's cousin Mary kept trying to kill her and Elizabeth would put her in prison and then eventually let her out and Mary kept trying to kill her. He asked if Elizabeth ever ended up deciding to kill her cousin or not and I couldn't even remember! The book was great, but isn't it weird that I couldn't even remember the resolution to the predominant conflict of the book? I felt proud of myself for not needing to remember how it all worked out in the end, but just that it did.