Coffee Klatch: Retro Edition

Americans tell harrowing 21st-birthday stories. By comparison, mine was pretty tame. 

Not "lame". Tame. I don't think anyone could beat it.

I turned 21 in the summer before my senior year of college. Since I worked on campus during summers, there I was in a Chicago suburb, with a few of my jazz band friends around. They took me out. (A tenor sax, a bassist, and... I want to say drummer?)

My guys knew their way around the city. 

We went to a couple of cool bars and lounges that had historically been connected to Al Capone. One was rumored to have a getaway tunnel built in. And I drank Irish coffees almost all night. 

I don't know why. It seemed right. 

Can't have been the only thing I had. Maybe a few white Russians or black Russians. My love of coffee was already deep-seated so any drink with coffee liqueur was worth trying.

What was I reading at the time?

I don't know that it ties to that particular summer, but I'm pretty sure that during the prior school year I was introduced to the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne via The House of the Seven Gables. (And a short story whose title eludes me.) 

Unfortunately, during that literature class I learned a trick that served me well ever after:

Don't read a book for class straight through. 

Hear me out: In college we all have mountains of homework. Time becomes scarce. Insisting on reading from wherever you left your bookmark will leave you in the dust. 

Instead, begin each night's reading at the start of the new assignment. 

That might mean not finishing the chapter your bookmark is in. That might mean skipping a chapter entirely. So during class, take copious notes during the discussion about the part you missed. You can get your class participation points by discussing the part of the assignment that you actually read. 

I can't say I loved The House of the Seven Gables as an assigned book. I did well in the class, though!

Years later, I read it straight through and - holy crap! - I loved it.

I read a couple more Hawthorne books, and he became my favorite of the New England Gothics. I even got to tour the original House of "Gables" fame when I visited a friend who lived up that way. But that's another story.

image source: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Seven_Gables

For a Retro Edition, I should have a retro question, but my question is actually this: 

What author were you forced to read that you ended up enjoying? 

(Or, conversely, if you expected to enjoy the book, which one surprised you the other way and made you hate it?)