Personally I prefer authors from the 1920s: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the like. But Moby Dick is a combination of long, a very American (New England) setting from a certain period in whaling, and a memorable story of obsession. I read it fairly recently and it’s actually a pretty good read. Fell free to start skimming when Melville gets into one of his long-winded encyclopedic descriptions of some whaling topic.