Google celebrates Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick with doodle

So you saw this on your Google page today and you are wondering why. Today is the 161st anniversary of Moby Dick the novel by Herman Melville and Google is putting up its doodle for the celebrations as it has done in the past with other remarkable anniversaries. Now this novel may sound very old to you and you are wondering what its all about. The GuardianUK explains.

It might, as Google so kindly points out with another of its random-anniversary doodles this morning, be 161 years since Moby-Dick was published in the UK, but the novel still seems to be everywhere. If it isn't Lynne Ramsay plotting a film version set in outer space – "It's about this mad captain whose crazy need for revenge takes the crew to their death. I'm taking people into dark waters and you see some casualties on the way" – then it's China Miéville (I've just realised how similar their surnames are! Coincidence??) turning the whale into a giant white mole in Railsea, or – and I haven't seen this – last year's film adaptation, complete with dragons and Vinnie Jones.

At least it hasn't suffered the erotic fate so many of the classics seem to be undergoing these days … although we do have this Kate Beckinsale reading, which is faintly disturbing.

Philip Hoare, meanwhile, is currently embroiled in a bonkers-but-brilliant project to broadcast the whole of the book, with readers from David Cameron to Will Self taking part. Writing that story a couple of weeks ago, I realised it'd been years since I'd actually read Moby-Dick, so I began trawling through Gutenberg's version to remind myself, matching passages to famous names and basically getting totally engrossed and taking much longer to write the piece than I should have.

This morning's doodle gives me the spurious excuse to quote at greater length some of my favourite bits. There's The Cassock; it's hard not to delight in Melville's description of "a very strange, enigmatical object … that unaccountable cone – longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg". There's the chill of The Whiteness of the Whale: "Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark."

I could go on, but I prefer not to – I'd rather know which your favourite bits are. It's time for a reread, I think.

 [TheGuardian]