Daily writing prompt

What’s a classic book that you think is overrated?

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I always feel a little nervous calling a classic book overrated, because every classic got that label for a reason. Usually, there are big themes involved. Human nature. Sin. Pride. Love. Death. Revenge. Society. Hypocrisy. The slow, tragic collapse of a man who really should have let something go about 400 pages ago.

So I don’t want to be unfair.

A classic book can absolutely have an important message. The problem is that sometimes the story carrying that message becomes so heavy, so slow, and so determined to educate you against your will that the message gets buried underneath the burden of reading the book.

Which brings me to Moby-Dick.

Or, more honestly, to the parts of Moby-Dick I actually read.

I don’t think I ever finished it. I’m pretty sure it was never required in any class I took. Or maybe it was, and I did what desperate students have done for generations and made a brief but meaningful visit to the sacred temple of Cliff’s Notes. I cannot say for certain. Time, like the sea, has swallowed the details.

But I do know this: the themes in Moby-Dick are undeniable.

Captain Ahab is a walking cautionary tale. He is what happens when obsession takes the wheel, locks the doors, throws the map out the window, and tells everyone else on board that they are now part of the problem. His pursuit of the whale is really a pursuit of revenge, control, meaning, and maybe even a fight against God Himself. That is powerful stuff.

I get that.

I respect that.

But at some point, while reading, I remember thinking, “Yes, yes, obsession destroys the soul. Very important. But did I also need a semester-long certification course in the whaling industry?”

Because Moby-Dick does not merely contain whales. It contains whale information. So much whale information. Whale anatomy. Whale behavior. Whale classification. Whale hunting. Whale processing. Whale symbolism. Whale everything.

Somewhere in there is one of literature’s great stories about a man destroyed by the thing he cannot release. Unfortunately, that story occasionally has to fight its way through what feels like an 1850s employee training manual for people reporting to their first day aboard a whaling ship.

And that, to me, is where a classic can become overrated.

Not because the message is bad. Not because the writing has no value. Not because generations of scholars are wrong and I, a man who may have bailed out somewhere around “Here’s another thing about whales,” have finally solved literature.

It’s overrated when the reputation of the book starts to make people pretend the experience of reading it is more enjoyable than it actually is.

Some books are good for you in the way vegetables are good for you. Other books are good for you in the way a root canal is technically good for you. You may be better off afterward, but that does not mean you want to schedule another one.

Moby-Dick may be one of the great American novels. I am not here to remove it from the canon. I am not filing a formal complaint with the Library of Congress. I am simply saying that the whale was not my enemy.

The pacing was.

The lectures were.

The feeling that I had accidentally enrolled in Maritime Biology 101 when I only came for the tragic revenge story was.

So, yes, I think Moby-Dick may be overrated—not because it lacks meaning, but because meaning alone does not always make a book readable.

Ahab’s obsession destroyed him.

Melville’s obsession with whales almost destroyed me.

And honestly, I think that may be the most relatable theme in the whole book.