(Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish. Want to make your own list? Clicking the image will take you to this week’s post. Happy listing!)
It’s fun to read books you know you’ll love, but it’s important to stretch your reading muscles now and then. Here’s some books that, for better or worse, took me out of my comfort zone.
1. Heart-Shaped Box (Joe Hill) – Pretty much the opposite of what I usually read. Not a scarring experience, but not one I care to repeat.
2. Millenium Trilogy (Stieg Larsson) – An amazing series, but so incredibly sexually violent that I could barely get through it.
3. Iron John (Robert Bly) – A weird book by a weird dude who I can’t decide whether or not to mock.
4. Lucy (Laurence Gonzales) – I’m not a huge fan of thrillers, and the whole genetic experimentation thing was hard to stomach.
5. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) – I don’t often read books with characters Anne’s age, and I confess I was a bit frustrated. She rattles on a lot throughout the first half of the book; everyone thinks it’s charming, but like Marilla, I’m not certain what to make of Anne.
6. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins) – Not my first experience with the Gothic genre, but definitely my first full immersion in it. A little long-winded, but still a great story.
7. Soulless (Gail Carriger) – Steampunk! Who’d have known I’d like it so much!
8. Gilgamesh (Anonymous) – Nothing like a 4,000 year-old story with some surprisingly contemporary themes to get one re-thinking about storytelling.
9. The Last Werewolf (Glen Duncan) – A good story, but so graphic. Too much for me.
10. Shades of Grey (Jasper Fforde) – I love Fforde, but I wasn’t expecting dystopian. Not a fan.
What’s gotten you out of your reading comfort zone recently?
Yay for Soulless! I hope you continue(d) with the series.
I haven’t yet, but I need to swing back around to it. Maybe in the new year…
I really struggled with Shades of Grey, even though I’m normally a big fan of Fforde’s novels. I liked a lot of the ideas in it, but I had trouble keeping track and it didn’t really hold my interest. I lent it to a friend afterwards and she loved it, so maybe I’ll attempt a re-read at some point!
I think I went into it with incorrect expectations. I love his other series (Thursday Next and the Nursery Crime series), and I guess I was hoping for more of the same. Shades of Grey was good, but it wasn’t clever, and that’s what I loved about Fforde’s writing. That and it was dystopian, my least favorite genre.
I had my doubts about Woman in White, too. It would have made a great story at half the length lol
I totally agree, Trish! It’s like Collins had all those plot ideas in his head and couldn’t decide which were best, so he just wrote them all. I kept waiting for the book to freaking end, but it just kept going and going…
The Last Werewolf was too graphic for me too…I couldn’t even finish it 🙁
I noticed this week that lots of folks largely listed books they didn’t enjoy. This was a difficult Top 10 Tuesday!
I had read several reviews of The Last Werewolf before picking it up, so I knew it would have a lot of explicit sex in it. I just wasn’t expecting it to be such violent, bloody, gross sex. Overall it’s a great book, but it was too much.
I noticed the same thing, that a lot of lists were full of “I didn’t like this.” That’s the danger of reading out of one’s comfort zone: you’re more likely find stuff you don’t like. Fortunately sometimes you find something you love, and that brings a whole new author or genre or topic into your reading realm, and that’s always a fun thing to have happen.
It was a tough list. It did help me realize that I don’t read out of my comfort zone enough — hopefully I’ll be better about that in the future. Thanks for stopping, by, Kat!
I still need to read Soulless – I need to bump it up Mount TBR
It’s a good one to read. “Mount TBR,” that’s awesome! And so appropriate! I may steal that. 😉