Moby-Dick
A whaling voyage that becomes a meditation on obsession, masculinity, race, God, and the indifference of nature. Melville's prose is oceanic, alternately beautiful and exhausting. It failed commercially in 1851 and was barely read for decades. Now it defines the outer limit of what American fiction has attempted.
"I would rather be harpooned than read this book ever again." By one reader's arithmetic, "85% of this book is various lessons on whaling," rope history, species taxonomy, an essay on the color white, delivered while the story you were promised idles offstage. "The whole middle of this book is pretty much a wash," another concludes, and teachers quietly agree, assigning students to skip entire chapters that nobody reports missing. The diction runs archaic, the sentences long enough to lose their subject en route to the verb, and the loving documentation of rendering down living whales turns stomachs the book never checks on. "Repetitive, expressionless and soul destroying": an adventure novella buried under the blubber.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
