After three years of intensive research involving many false leads, a team of UCLA anthropologists has located and identified the only current undergraduate in the United States who has read an entire book for a college course.
Timothy Durvineaux, a sophomore at Middlebury College in Vermont, read all 635 pages of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for a Spring 2025 seminar on “Whales in American Fiction.”
Timothy, a hedge-fund major, apparently read the novel by mistake. “I thought the professor said we had to read the book, but it turns out that she was fine with us watching the 1956 movie starring Gregory Peck, which is what everyone else did. Am I stupid or what?”
When asked to describe what it was like to read the world-famous novel, Durvineaux responded, “Holy crap, there were so many words! Page after page with nothing but words. My copy had no pictures or drawings. You’d think they would at least put in a picture of a whale or a ship or a harpoon or something to break up the monotony. But nope. It was a nightmare.”
The research team asked Timothy if he planned to read more books during his junior and senior years at Middlebury.
“You’re kidding, right?”