We read Moby-Dick as a book about obsession, and it is. But roughly a third of it is Melville explaining whales: taxonomy, rope, the anatomy of blubber, how a try-works actually renders oil. Modern readers skip those chapters. Melville did not write them to be skipped.
He had earned them. He shipped out on the whaler Acushnet in 1841 and deserted in the Marquesas, and the cetology is a working sailor's material, not padding between the good bits.
It did not land. The book sold badly, the reviews were largely baffled, and Melville died in 1891 with his reputation mostly gone. The reading we now treat as obvious -- Ahab as the engine, the whale as the symbol -- belongs to the 1920s revival, thirty years after his death. The first readers got a book about whaling and said so.
So which of us is misreading it? Is the obsession reading the one that finally saw the book clearly, or the one that found a way to keep the parts we like and quietly drop the parts Melville actually cared about?