Photograph courtesy Joshua Simpson

The novelist Joshua Ferris was standing in the basement of the Ace Hotel in Midtown on Friday night, looking frustrated. He had just read ten minutes of “Moby-Dick” to a crowd of more than a hundred devotees. He was pretty sure he hadn’t nailed his passage. “I was confronted with a shit-ton of tribal names!” Ferris said. He opened his copy of the book and pointed to the passage, which read: “But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical.” He shook his head. “That word has three ‘g’ ’s in it and only three consonants! And this one has four ‘e’ ’s in it.”

Ferris was the ninth reader out of roughly a hundred and fifty who participated in the second biennial Moby-Dick Marathon NYC, which ran for a nonconsecutive twenty-four hours and fourteen minutes across three Manhattan venues over the weekend. Because readers were assigned ten-minute time slots rather than page numbers, every reader but the first and the last could only guess at which portion would be theirs. “There’s something terrifying about the language of the book, like a fear that you’ll run aground while reading a word you hadn’t read before,” said Téa Obreht, the twentieth reader, who looked relieved at her performance. “And the listeners in the back are reading along, so you can’t miss a word.”

The listeners who weren’t following along in their own books were primarily lost in contemplation, drinking, knitting, napping, or trying to keep their children either quiet or engaged with the text. One listener played Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: The Game on her iPhone. (“Play as the White Whale, smash ships, explore the seas, and upgrade yourself!”) One listener, a twenty-three-year-old fashion student wearing a bicycle helmet papier-mâchéd to look like the white whale, struck up a conversation with the actor-director Alex Karpovsky, the fourteenth reader. Other listeners were perusing the merchandise table, which was selling copies of both “Moby-Dick” and Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Why Read Moby-Dick?”

In the hallway outside the Ace Hotel’s auditorium, three bespectacled children took a break from the reading to punch, jump on, and tickle one another. Horatio, a twelve-year-old wearing a madras blazer and protective eyeglasses, stopped horsing around for long enough to admit that he had only read the abridged version of “Moby-Dick.” “I didn’t read the unabridged version because it’s super long,” he said. He looked around for his mother, then added in a whisper, “And some of it is kind of boring.”

The readers, composed primarily of novelists and poets, were generally fans of “Moby-Dick,” but a few wanted to participate in the marathon for other reasons. “It’s much more fun to read stuff that’s not my own,” the novelist and filmmaker Stephen Elliott said. “I mean, if no one shows up, it’s not a referendum on my writing.” Elliott, who was the last reader of the night, continued: “I haven’t read the book. I’m not going to read the book. I’m sure it’s a great book, but I’m not going to read it. The things I want to read have usually been written in the last fifty years. I’m … not an intellectual. I guess I should at least say I’m going to read it, but I’m not.” Elliott then perched on a table outside of the auditorium, opened his laptop, and watched “Deadwood” on HBO Go while he waited for his turn to read. “It’s an incredible show,” he said.

On Saturday, the longest day of the event, the reading continued for thirteen hours inside the Melville Gallery at the South Street Seaport Museum. In the late morning, it was about forty degrees outside and the gallery was unheated, which, some listeners remarked, brought the feeling of being on a whaling ship. Very few people took off their coats or hats.

In the afternoon, as part of a street fair taking place on a neighboring street, a rock band began to play in an alley a few feet outside the gallery’s window. They started a few minutes before Lynne Tillman began to read. “It was sort of like being in a bar,” Tillman said after her reading, more tickled than annoyed. “I’ve done readings in bars. But when they stopped it was quiet, and it felt like a church. And I soldiered on!” The band also soldiered on, for about four hours, unaware of the reading next door.

In the early evening, Jami Attenberg, the author of “The Middlesteins,” walked in holding a cup of tea. She immediately fortified it with some whiskey. After admitting that she also had not read “Moby-Dick”(“and I’m probably not going to read it”) but was very excited to be a part of the marathon reading, she critiqued the band playing outside. “What an interesting musical choice for this alley! Gloomy synth pop.” She took a sip of her tea.

Nathaniel Philbrick—the author of both “Why Read Moby Dick?” and “In the Heart of the Sea,” a nonfiction account of the survivors of the Essex, the real-life ship that “Moby-Dick” ’s the Pequod is based on—was perhaps the most anticipated reader of the day. “Where ‘Moby-Dick’ ends is where my book begins—it’s a survival book,” he said. “They’re reduced to survival cannibalism.” “In the Heart of the Sea” was recently adapted into a film, directed by Ron Howard, scheduled to be released in March of 2015. “I haven’t seen the film yet, but the trailer looks really cool!” Philbrick said. “I was an extra in the movie, a Quaker, but you can’t see me because I was with thirty other Quakers. It was weird leaving Nantucket, flying to England, and walking onto the Warner Brothers lot, where they’d recreated Nantucket.” He shrugged. “I can’t get over that.”

A few minutes later, the writer Virginia Heffernan (reader sixty-five) and the poet Michael Robbins (reader eighty-three), stood in the back, surveying the audience. “I like how many people here look like Herman Melville,” said Heffernan. “They’re lumbersexual,” replied Robbins. Robbins then mentioned the phrase “We don’t like Henry James so much we like Herman Melville” from the poem “Personal Poem,” by Frank O’Hara. “We prefer Melville, who’s earthy, to Henry James, who’s upper-crust and psychologistic,” he said. Heffernan thought about this for a second and then nodded. “Yeah. It’s, like, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ gay, not ‘Brideshead Revisited’ gay,” she said.

On Sunday, at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, the temperature was toasty and there was no interfering noise, and the hundreds of nonfiction pages about the minutiae of the nineteen-century whaling industry were past. Energy and attention levels were high. Two hours before the scheduled end of the book, the room was packed, standing-room only, but true devotees had arrived four hours earlier.

In the back of the room sat Yi Deng, a twenty-five-year-old Housing Works volunteer, who had been knitting a red scarf since the reading began. She hadn’t missed a single reader (and had produced four feet of scarf). “I’ve always wanted to read ‘Moby-Dick,’ and here you can listen to more than a hundred readers who like the book read it. The time just disappears! Yesterday, it was thirteen hours, and I didn’t even notice time passing.”

The only other listener who was present for every single reader was David Lam, a twenty-four-year-old architect. He was not knitting, just sitting and listening. “It’s been an interesting adventure,” he said. “I think I need to read the book a few more times to fully get a grasp on it. One thing I’ve noticed is that Ishmael is unrealistically knowledgeable. He knows things that strike me, truthfully, as unrealistic for a sailor on a merchant ship.”

Toward the very end, the crowd became quiet. Amor Towles, a novelist and the final reader, wore a top hat and dramatized the last few pages (“Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers?”). A little girl clutched her legs to her chest and rocked in her seat. Her mother flipped through pages of an illustrated version of the book, but the girl was not paying attention. When Towles finished, the crowd exhaled in unison.