Books that surprised you

I recently posted about reading Patricia Highsmith's THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY; I mentioned that I'd picked up the book on a whim and ended up enjoying it far more than I'd expected.

Other books that surprised me: David Gemmell's first book in his TROY series...and I was astonished at how LITTLE I thought of Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, after hearing nothing but rave reviews about it for months.

Have you even been surprised--for good or ill--by a book? Do tell...

The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott. I had vague memories of the telly programme from the 1980s, but after reading the book I immediately put all of Paul Scott's books on my wants list.

More recently, The history Man by Malcolm Bradbury.... I tried starting it once earlier this year, but couldn't be doing with the great wodges of paragraphs. Then I took it with me on a trip to London, and once I'd got stuck into it found myself enjoying it a lot. The committee scene in particular is classic.

I also found Ballard's Crash a lot more readable than I'd expected.

And, despite loving Truffaut's film, I was surprised to discover that Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 really was quite poor.

My go-to bad experience is Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. The social ideas, especially regarding different marriage arrangements, were pretty cool. On the other hand, the writing was terrible. The book, supposedly about a political revolution on the Moon, read like minutes from a Brezhnev-era Politburo meeting.

I was amazed by "The Royal Family" by William Vollmann It was the first Vollmann book I ever read. Between the cover and the subject matter, I thought it would be a fun prurient ride, but it was anything but. It was an epic, dirty, ferocious, beautiful monster of a book.

I hated The Crying of Lot 49. It was my first Pynchon book and I haven't read any Pynchon since. I was expecting to love it, since he's so often mentioned in the same breath as DeLillo, and I loved Underworld.

I loved the LOTR movies, but found the books boring. Between all the tarrying and Hobbit songs, it got repetitive and tiresome.

I enjoyed The Fountainhead when I read it at age 16. Now it just seems like a longwinded farce.

I was impressed with Juliette Horrific, encyclopedic, erudite, depraved, and psychotic. How many works written before 1800 can still shock us modern, post-Hiroshima, post-Auschwitz, post-Gitmo-types?

Lacking the possessive S drives me from the LOTR books. Everything is: Bridge of Tork, Horn of Flakk, Sword of Flib. It makes my ears bleed.

>6 benjclark:
"It makes my ears bleed."

Great line.

I was very happily surprised with Candide, as I was unaware of it being a comic novel when I started reading it. The black humor, even the brutal bits, really holds up.
I also read The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson because the title intrigued me and was blown away. Now I have a collection of his books.
Bad experiences- The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. So boooring. Also an ER book, Dali & I , which I just knew I was going to like as when it arrived but I ended up wondering how such amateur, slanderous crap could have been published. Makes my top three of worst books I've ever read.

Neg: I got only about one-quarter into Stranger in a Strange Land before I just couldn't take any more of Heinlein's beyond-ridiculous female characters.

Pos: Crippen, by John Boyne. Historical fiction is usually hit-or-miss, and more often miss, if you're a snob. This, however, was a really nice surprise--a satire in the vein of T.C. Boyle's "loosely based on" books.

Dali's novel "Hidden Faces" didn't exactly wow me either. Then again, there's bound to be some duds with Dali, since he created a multimedia empire almost as disturbing and omnipresent as Martha Stewart