Thursday, December 1, 2011

30 days of book Discussion: Day 9

A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving


I'm going to have to pick The Help by Kathryn Stockett for this one.   I didn't think I would like it for two reasons:
1. There was so much hype I wasn't sure it could live up to the expectations.  2. I read light, adventurous young adult books.  I'm not really a beautiful, meaningful-book kind of girl.  There are beautiful, meaningful books that I love, but it's generally not what I'm searching out when looking for my next read.  They're kind of exhausting.  I'm in "meaning" up to my neck most of the time - honestly, in my family, life is one big exploration of how we feel about stuff.  Give me a little battle to the death, please.

But.  The Help was just awesome.  I listened to the audiobook because I thought it would help me to focus better.  This is my trick for reading books that I secretly don't want to read, because the reader forces me to keep moving through the sentences whether I like it or not!  Ha!  But I needed absolutely no help with this one.  In fact I loaded it on my iPod, and carried the iPod around with me all day and night, laying in bed in the dark to listen to half an hour more... well, okay, an hour.  The audiobook totals about 15 hours, and I finished them all in six days.  Yup.  One thing that helped were the performers - three women who did a breathtaking job.  I was captivated from the first chapter.  And, of course, it had all sorts of meanings and messages and I enjoyed every last one of them.

So basically, it was a nice surprise!  And I don't have to feel quite so silly about my reading preferences being only kid books.  Whew!

What about you? Did you have a book you loved even though you didn't think you would?

4 comments:

Hannah said...

I finally read Princess Academy. I was avoiding it because I thought it would be "frilly-frilly-frou-frou" which I don't even mind, so it was weird that I was avoiding it. I ended up really liking it.

amy jo said...

Its kind of embarrassing really but I ended up reading "Pride and Prejudice" as an assignment in high school. I thought it would be lame but I got hooked pretty quick and loved it of course.

amy jo said...

I just had another experience with this. My mother in law gave me the book thief like a year ago and I could not get past the first chapter. I did not like it at all. Then i picked it up this week while waiting for inheritance and read the whole thing in a few days. I really liked it.

amy jo said...

I just had another experience with this. My mother in law gave me the book thief like a year ago and I could not get past the first chapter. I did not like it at all. Then i picked it up this week while waiting for inheritance and read the whole thing in a few days. I really liked it.