Sixteen hours to read Moby Dick? That recalls the old Woody Allen joke about speed-reading: "I read War and Peace in two hours. It's about Russia."
I speed read War and Peace for the first time in ~4 hours for the school test (I refused to read assigned literature). It went into one ear and into another.
I then re-read it while recovering from the surgery over a leisurely week and enjoyed it tremendously as I think would anyone who gives it time.
My mother told me she read just the Peace parts, while my father admitted to reading only the War parts (they are pretty much alternate chapters).
There was a time I wanted to learn Russian to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
It's too bad we can't structure assigned reading and coursework in terms of choice, I distinctly remember choosing to work on harder assignments when given choices back in the grade school era.
People want 1.5 speed because that's what gets the narrator back to a normal speaking speed.
You can read those masterworks at a superficial level and they’re usually somewhat rewarding. Or you can read Dostoyevsky while deep diving on Russian history and get a notably different experience. But it takes a lot longer.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/th...
Overanalysing it kills that pleasure and atmosphere. That is not reading, that is doing seminar.