A very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle. It was in the top of a shelf and it fell on my head while trying to reach for something else. It really did surprised me.
So, I’m going to ignore more recent, much smaller instances of surprise to talk about The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer., which ran me the fuck over with surprise in 2022-ish.
This book is marketed as gay YA romance. The cover, the blurb, everything makes it look like a light romance novel set in space, with maybe some space plot to go with the romance.
IT IS NOT THAT.
It’s a mindfucky, philosophical, emotionally wringing rollercoaster of a scifi horror/thriller. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar. It’s got that same sort of “small humans isolated in the sheer, terrifying vastness of space” vibe. But more horror, more tragedy, and sometimes incredibly upsetting.
There is gay romance there too, and it’s an important part of the book (in the way that romance can be important in any literature without that making it romance genre per se), but advertising this book as straightforwardly gay romance is like advertising Interstellar as a family man movie while just ignoring all the epic space shots and the dramatic score and so on. It just boggles the mind that they did this.
Anyway, this book does have some flaws I can nitpick on a technical level in retrospect, but the thing is: I just don’t care about them. This book wrung me out and haunted me for weeks after reading it (like, it kept popping into my head in the middle of doing completely unrelated things), yet it also left me feeling hopeful and more at peace with the inevitability of death.
I thought it was just gonna be a fun romance to escape into for a bit, and instead it’s one of the few novels that has genuinely changed the way I see real life in a noticeable way. I still think about it sometimes, now over a year later. It’s one of the best scifi books I’ve read in recent memory, along with the likes of the Murderbot books by Martha Wells and Exhalation by Ted Chiang (though these three are all very different than one another, and they are among my favorites for different reasons).
Going on like this about a book of course runs the risk that anyone who takes this recommendation and doesn’t like it as much as I did might feel disappointed and over-hyped, but a) I can at least promise I mean all of this earnestly and b) it seems hard to get anyone to read a book advertised as gay YA romance unless they are already people who would be down for reading some gay YA romance.
The thought that this book may eventually end up lost to time because of its marketing pains me. Although I guess I can imagine why they did it, even though it’s inaccurate for the contents; the queer YA romance readership is huge and this book seems to have done well with them, even though the goodreads reviews are as a result amusingly chock full of accounts like mine here.
Okay, turns out I’ve had this book on my list for a while and I couldn’t exactly remember why I had it in there until your description jogged my memory! Sounds like I need to read this one soon!
The Invisible Life of Addie Larue - VE Schwab. It was sad and poetic horror story, but I was surprised by the poetic nature of its story.
The Lesser Dead - Christopher Buehlman. To tell you how it surprised me would give away far too much, but if you like untraditional horror stories, give this one a try. You may find it as satisfying as I did.
i wonder if the best way to think about self-help as a genre is as a sort of placebo genre, where the act of engaging with the genre is a more useful act toward whatever you want to do than actually reading any particular book.
I get what you're saying. Merely being the impetus to make the effort has value.
It's kind of how I feel about pop science stuff like Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers is a little better than nothing, but there's a lot wrong with his core characterization of the research compared to reality. But if less people are going to read stuff like Peak or Range that use some academic rigor, is the partial presentation being popularized better? Or is the misrepresentation more harm than good?
I'm not entirely sure. But I do know to take his work with a heavy dose of skepticism.
(In this example, Ericsson (Peak) was on the initial research Gladwell jumps "10k hours" off of, which only explored the very structured training, with frequent feedback, of classical violin. Epstein (Range) sort of presents his as critiquing the original work, but mostly is really pointing to the flaws of Gladwell's presentation, before providing a different perspective mixing anecdotes with research supporting a broader base and showcasing how bringing ideas from other disciplines can have a lot of value to problem solving.)
Piranesi – after Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell being a thousand page masterpiece, Clark comes out with this short thing decades later that is simultaneously completely different but also amazing in its own way. As a fan of her first book, I was initially put off due to the lack of length, assuming that meant lack of depth.
The Library at Mount Char. I wasn’t sure what was going on/where it was going for much of it like a good Cohen Brothers movie. And there were definitely a few things that I didn’t expect to happen.
I recently finished up Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it! I got the impression, for whatever reason, that it was overhyped. But I enjoyed seeing how the characters developed and seeing the ebbs and flows of their relationships, which I thought was well done and believable. There was a lot more depth there than I was expecting. I also thought it was going to be more of a traditional love story and was (pleasantly) surprised that it wasn’t!
Another surprise for me was The Silmarillion. I’m a fan of LotR, but I still expected it to be a bit of a slog. But, wow, I tore through that book so quickly! Loved the stories and lore and mythology and everything, incredible!
I’ve read 3 books by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. TBK’s my favourite. When I first read C&P, I read the Constance Garnett translation. I found the book to be OK but a little slow. Later when I read the P&V translation, I some how found it to be a faster read. I guess the translation that you try (provided you are not reading the original Russian) matters as far as reading enjoyment goes. I would say C&P is a faster read (as far as I remember) compared to TBK. I think it can be a good starting point for trying out Dostoevsky. And yes, The Master And Margarita is definitely amazing.
I actually split between reading and listening to the audiobook. It was long either way! I didn’t care for it as much as I thought I would. The first part took me a while to get into, I loved the second part, but after
I remember where I was driving when I listened to the first part, the narrator was excellent and made the whole tree section a surprisingly engrossing listen.
I agree about where the story started to falter, too. There was a lot of build-up to that point and it felt like it kinda meandered to the end afterwards.
For non fiction I’d probably say Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen R. Platt.
A history of the taiping rebellion, it takes a very close eye to some of the more prominent people of the conflict and examines the whole thing in much more detail than you can usually get from English language sources.
For fiction I’m split between The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern. A tragedy focusing on a fictional protest encampment in an alternate present where Al gore won in 2000 rather than bush, and instead of declaring war of terror declared war on climate change. ‘Green tech’ and carbon credits stand ascendent yet the oil refineries are still going strong, and the real cost being put on those least capable of handling it.
I forgot to mention what I was split with and that’s probably Light Bringer by Pierce Brown, the 6th book in the red rising series. A quintessential space opera with all the grand scale and melodrama that brings with it, while also defying many of the cliches of that genera with less one dimensional villains and more moral grey area, (and a heaping helping of edge). Not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoy it.
I put down The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco and lazily enjoyed Charles Stross’ The Atrocity Archives.
According to wikipedia it mixes the genres of; Lovecraftian horror, spy thriller, science fiction, and workplace humour, which is quite accurate for a starter IMO.
Literature
Active