Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Have been putting this off for a long, long time as I thought I knew what to expect - a bleak tale of one man's obsession overriding all over concerns and driving him to his own destruction. Or, alternatively, the first Great American Novel, an allegory for the zeal that drove Americans to conquer the wilderness and imposed man's manifest destiny on nature. Turns out it's neither of those things really, it's just a book about whaling, but someone who really really likes whaling. It reminded me in parts of a Radio 4 documentary where you have some eccentric old buffer enthusiastically explaining his love of horse brass collection,  or performing forgotten Slovakian folk songs. It was very funny too, it its bombastic use of language and determination to prove that whaling is a noble profession on a par or even superior to any other form of human activity, whether it be poetry, jousting or something more prosaic.