I've been thinking about whether classic literature still speaks to us or if it's just homework now. Last month I picked up Moby Dick for the first time since college, expecting a chore, but the obsession and isolation in it felt painfully relevant to how I scroll through social media at 2 a.m. Yet my students groan when I assign anything written before 2000, saying it's too slow and irrelevant. Is the problem with the books or with how we teach them, and can a reader truly connect with a text from a completely different century without losing something?