I'm with you on Moby Dick, though I always feel guilty about that. I was loving that book, up until the whaling and "whiteness" chapters. I never got past that. Les Miserables, by contrast, I absolutely loved — even the essay-digressions. Hugo is an absolutely genius at dropping what seems at the time like the most inconsequential seed into the plot and then having it flourish into a great reveal a hundred or so pages later.