Russell Brand, Moby-Dick

This month, we are delighted to bring you all a book choice from comedian, actor, author and activist Russell Brand.

Moby Dick is like a secular Bible. Maybe not even secular, alternative. Melville is writing from a place of such deep psychological truth, grounded in and set within his experience in whaling, that eventually the book feels like an incantation. He is writing about the architecture of consciousness, the archetypes that inhabit it, using images and stories so real that it’s almost impossible to think of them as arriving via the imagination of one person. They seem like they have been discovered, not created. Ahab, Queegueg, Ishmael, Starbuck and of course the white whale; the monster beneath the surface, the unobtainable everything, the mystery. When you read Moby Dick you experience the vastness of being, the dreadful beauty. The buoyancy of purpose amidst the nihilistic torrent. The masterpiece of masterpieces.