Moby-Dick

Melville did not write just a seafaring adventure novel but a treatise on obsession, power and self-destruction. The white whale is far more than an animal: it is whatever each reader projects onto it, and that is what keeps the book alive a century and a half on. It is long, full of technical digressions about whaling that frustrate many readers, but Ahab's voice and the ending are among the most powerful in English-language literature. Not for everyone, but it never pretended to be.