The "Burden" of Secondary Sources

I'm interested in what some people said the other day about feeling "burdened" by the expectations that come with reading a long-celebrated and analyzed text like Moby-Dick. Somehow, a huge number of secondary sources and different interpretations can be more intimidating than helpful to the reader - especially to someone like me. Ideally, I'd like to read Moby-Dick as an adventure-philosophical-character-study, but as if the novel had just come out, its interpretations left solely to me.

Unfortunately, reading criticism before you finish the book not only gives away the ending (more often than not), but offers strange interpretations that color the reading experience, whether negatively or not. Therefore, reading too many secondary sources seems to cloud the "innocent" process of reading a book for the first time.

I began to think a lot about "innocent" reading, and whether it is possible nowadays to read classic literature without expecting too much or too little, since there is always the temptation to consult secondary sources before finishing the book.

I randomly found a good quote on "innocent" reading and secondary sources in a biography on Kafka (and a look at his work):

"The scene of scholars stepping all over one another to reach the 'crest' of meaning might seem comic today, but all this intellectual endeavor continues to affect our reading of the novel: every approach, even one deeply flawed, shapes its object." (Reiner Stach)

So, despite our enthusiasm for a great text or our attentiveness to its meaning, we often experience the novel mostly from the outside - either in aggrement with or in opposition to certain strands of criticism. I don't expect to enjoy a perfectly "pure" reading experience, which is impossible, but do wish that secondary sources played slightly less of a role in the "proper way" to understand a book.