Moby Dick

I made a conscious effort to read more classic literature this year and this was top of my list. Unfortunately I was disappointed. What I was expecting was a swashbuckling high-seas adventure. What I got was an over-long, plodding narrative stuffed with excessive pseudo-scientific descriptions of the whaling industry. One hundred pages in and our narrator still hadn't set foot on a boat which only caught up with the fabled white whale in the last three chapters of the book (from page 514).