Campaign for the American Reader: Nine great titles about survival at sea

Kathleen Rooney is the nationally bestselling author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, as well as Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey and From Dust to Stardust. She has won the

Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from Poetry magazine and the Adam Morgan Literary Citizen Award from the Chicago Review of Books. Rooney’s criticism can be found in The New York Times, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and beyond. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches English and creative writing at DePaul University.

Rooney's new novel is Man Overboard!.

[The Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl; The Page 99 Test: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs; My Book, The Movie: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs; My Book, The Movie: Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk; The Page 69 Test: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey; My Book, The Movie: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey; Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney (July 2022); The Page 69 Test: Where Are the Snows; Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney (September 2022); The Page 69 Test: From Dust to Stardust; My Book, The Movie: From Dust to Stardust; Q&A with Kathleen Rooney; Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney (September 2023); The Page 69 Test: Man Overboard!]

At Lit Hub the author tagged nine great "accounts of people lost at sea, struggling to be found." One title on the list:

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Okay, okay, everybody knows this one is great, yet it still manages to be misunderstood and underrated. It took me three tries over a span of many years before I was able to lock in with this novel, but it was worth the repeated effort. In high school, I started it and could tell it was amazing, but didn’t connect; same in grad school. In 2019 on the occasion of Melville’s 200th birthday, the Newberry Library here in Chicago hosted a 25-hour marathon live reading of the book—a Dick-a-Thon, if you will—and invited local authors to participate. Moby-Dick is my spouse’s, the writer Martin Seay’s, favorite novel of all time, so naturally he wanted to join. So did I, but it felt wrong to do so if I hadn’t read the whole behemoth. That January I devoured the story over the course of 10 days and it remains a peak reading experience of my existence. Like Moby himself rising from the deep, the book crushed me:

“Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterrous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot length-wise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.”