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The very first novel I was required to read in college was Albert Camus's The Plague. Boy, did I hate that one. It took my a while before I realized that college life would not be four years of reading books like that!
Another college requirement that I thought was dreadful was Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. Twenty years later I saw the movie, and I hated that too! That was supposed to be somewhat autobiographical, and all it was was hundreds of pages of the heroine feeling sorry for herself.
My sophomore year I took a course on Melville, and read every novel he wrote up to the one past Moby Dick (Was it Billy Budd?). Moby Dick was a summation of what he had been writing all those previous years, so by the time he got to it, his allusions were pretty familiar to the reader. I'm not sure I would have understood Moby Dick if I had read it cold turkey without reading Typee and the others first.
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