I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but… we live in a world that increasingly and exhaustively thrives on false dichotomies and divisions.

If you don’t like something it is automatically “bad.” Or if you happen to like something someone else doesn’t, you get chewed out. Everyone has to be right; everyone else is wrong. Social media wars are started in this spirit, leaving little room for nuance and seeding a dense atmosphere of negativity. Pick an innocuous topic and there is usually a skirmish being waged over it: the Star Wars sequels; pumpkin pie; displaying books with their spines turned inward; good books, bad books. To finish or not to finish.

Ironically there is another “debate” about whether you “should” stick with a bad book and finish it. As if quitting in any context is a sign of moral failure. Michelle Ruiz, in her recent opinion piece in Vogue magazine, says, “For every book, there is a time, a mood and a season.” Quitting a book might just be an act of self-care.

My DNF (did not finish) list is long. It doesn’t mean those books are “bad.” Perhaps I was in a mood, or I didn’t connect to the story or the characters, or it just wasn’t my genre, or I wasn’t ready. It means “maybe later,” or simply “nah.” Not everything is or will be my favorite. It’s neither my fault nor the author’s. And that’s okay.

Of course, there are books will disappoint. Books written in poor taste. Books that exploit. That lie about the world and people. That rub you the wrong way. And because you spend a lot of time with a book, let it into your soul for a while, it does feel like an affront or an attack when the writing sours and the story falls apart.

But I no longer waste my time these days getting mad about books that disappoint, or offend, or disgust. Nor do I fly to Goodreads and leave a scathing out-of-context review. (I tried it once, and hated myself for it.) Instead, I move on.

I didn’t always move on.

The first book that wildly offended me was Moby-Dick. It wouldn’t be the last.

Moby-Dick

I was a high school junior in 2002-2003. It was widely known that 11th graders in Honors English studied American literature from Hawthorne to Gatsby to Hemingway. We knew that Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was waiting for us. Horror stories of a long and boring unit trickled down from the students of Honors English past. “Junior Honors English? Watch out for Moby-Dick!” they’d chuckle knowingly, leaving us in a cold sweat.

It was either late fall or post-holiday winter, and the class met in one of those chilly impermanent modular classrooms in the parking lot, because the school was being retrofitted for air conditioning. (Fun fact: Omaha Central High School was one of the last schools in Omaha, Nebraska to get AC.) We made it through post-colonial literature as the weather got colder. We finished The Scarlet Letter, and soon enough, we came upon Moby-Dick. (Insert Jaws theme here.)

Tell me it’s not long and boring. I dare you.

Some stats for you: Moby-Dick is by some counts 427 pages and 215,136 words long. By contrast: Jane Eyre is 183,858; Middlemarch by George Eliot is 316,059; Great Expectations by Charles Dickens,183,439; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling, 198,227; The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 87,000; Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 130,000.

Moby-Dick struck me as a 80% whaling how-to and whale anatomy text. It was maybe 20% story. Written in 1851, there are no women even mentioned. (That’s a lot to expect from a story set on a whaling ship in the 1800s but nonetheless it was hard for me to relate.) The narrator is a cipher. From the get-go, you know the captain is going to lead his crew to a bad end. The novel dragged to that inevitable conclusion. Dragged.

One day at lunch, I was in complaining about how awful Moby-Dick was (preaching to the choir, of course). And in a fit of adolescent hyperbole, I suggested it was no wonder Herman Melville had died in poverty, and Moby-Dick was “so bad” it should be burned. I knew burning books is a morally reprehensible act, but I was in a foul mood, and saying it out loud made me feel better. I was protesting a book I was forced to read. I wanted to unread it.

A few weeks later, some of my friends–inspired by my dramatic speech–actually did burn copies of it in a fireplace. I was horrified. Book burning was the modus operandi of Nazis and other cruel and paranoid ignoramuses. And, besides, I hadn’t meant it literally. (Or had I?)

But part of me definitely wished I’d been there.

After Moby-Dick

Whenever I look back on this I cringe with embarrassment. Because I know what it feels like to invest so much time and energy and soul into writing a novel. Over time, I realized that it didn’t matter whether Moby-Dick inspired or bored me. Some people do love it, find as much meaning in it, or as little, as they want. It speaks to them over a century later, and that’s what matters. I don’t have to love it. That was never the point.

It was never about me–an insecure Star Wars-focused teenager–in the first place.

And it was an opportunity to ask a more vital question: what does speak to me? To find that answer I had to keep reading. And reading.

The next year I discovered Jane Eyre, and the world changed for me. Suddenly, something clicked in my brain about what and how and why I wanted to write. Jane was spoke to me in ways that Ishmael couldn’t. And the rest is history.

So, to correct my impulsive, quick-to-react teenage self, Moby-Dick isn’t “bad.” It’s an American classic, and rightly so. As a hubristic tale, it is almost on par with Macbeth. It still isn’t a favorite. But it has endured over a century and earned my respect.

There it is: respect. It changes the whole conversation. So…

I can respect Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) as a powerful and disturbing work, considered to be the first science-fiction novel. But I’d never read it for “fun.”

Nor do I have the desire to pick up Stephen King’s It again. I made it through the first fifty pages. Horror, especially child-eating foulness, is not for me.

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) for a picture of empty wealth and decadence and the price one pays for it. Otherwise, I personally find it boring. Still no apologies from me.

I could not connect to or make sense of Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, but it is considered to be the quintessence of cyberpunk (not my genre). These two things–my lack of connection to it and its importance–are not mutually exclusive.

Years ago, I tried to read Frank Herbert’s Dune. I’d wanted to expand my science-fiction knowledge; Dune seemed appealing than Asimov, and it was supposed to be a major influence on Star Wars. But I couldn’t get passed the first ten pages. No small wonder. It’s dense and strange and written in the third-person omniscient with complex layers of language, religion, and ecology. It is not an easy work. But this year, I returned to Dune and finished it. And I’m so glad I did. It is indeed a masterpiece worth the effort of reading. The film by Denis Villeneuve and starring Timothée Chalamet (see the trailer below) blew my mind. It is not to be missed.

I’ve learned I can respect Ernest Hemingway, Isaak Asimov, or Philip K. Dick for their accomplishments, but there is no literary law that I have to have “read” them thoroughly or at all. They are not the final word of all things science-fiction. I don’t have have to like their writing styles. Nor do I have to ignore the facts about their sexist or abusive natures just because they had Big Ideas.

I’ve come to other interesting conclusions. that some books are worth reading once and never again (The Handmaid’s Tale). I’ve let childhood favorites go when I outgrow them and to look at them in a cautious and critical light (Harry Potter and Peter Pan), and to return to those which still resonate (Catherine, Called Birdy). I would never have found many of my favorites if I had struggled through books I didn’t like instead, books that the critics–professional or otherwise–deemed “essential.”

Life is too short for that.

So, what happens when you burn Moby-Dick? You forget that it’s just a book about a man who hates an animal. And you miss the opportunity to ask yourself “Why doesn’t this work for me?” and follow up with “What does?” and “What would make it better?”

Now, that’s nuance.

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