10 Books I Enjoyed that were Outside My Comfort Zone

Top Ten Tuesday is currently hosted by Artsy Reader Girl and has weekly topics for bloggers to respond to and share a love of all things books! I love thinking up my responses and the weekly blog hop to see what everyone else wrote!

For this week’s prompt were looking for books that I enjoyed that were outside my comfort zone.

Comfort zone is a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition. (Thank you, Wikipedia)

When it comes to books that basically means any book where I’m not sure I will enjoy it and worry that I’ll either find it boring or it’ll irritate me!

I think I can split this into categories.

Romance

I don’t reach much romance because it’s an irritating trope minefield and also I find a lot of them quite boring and predictable, but I still give one a go from time to time and sometimes I find a gem!

1. Secrets of a Summer Night – a Regency Romance with a very sickly looking cover, I only read it because the series is called ‘The Wallflowers’ and I had half an idea to do a project on wallflower characters (maybe one day). I ended up loving it and this whole series.
2. Book Lovers – Romance is a danger zone, but I loved this because it subverted tropes that usually irritate me.

Non-fiction

I don’t read much non-fiction because it can be dry and boring, and I never remember what I’ve learned! But sometimes a bit of history with human stories will interest me.

3. Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy – I don’t read a lot of non-fiction because it can be too dry, but this isn’t at all. Haunting.
4. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman – I was interested in her after visiting Chatsworth, and I did enjoy this even if I wasn’t able to retain a lot of the historical detail.
5. Catherine the Great by Robert Massie – this was even further out my comfort zone because the politics of the Russian Empire are foreign to be and also involve a lot of very similar Russian names. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on or who was who, but it’s a wild time anyway.
6. My Name Is Why by Lemn Sissy – this is a memoir written by poet Lemn Sissay (official poet of the 20212 Olympics) recounting his experience as a black child placed into long-term foster care with a white working-class Baptist family in the late 1960s. As you can imagine, that wasn’t a good time. He later learned his Ethiopian mother (whom he was able to reconnect with in his 20s) gave birth in Britain in a home for unmarried mothers, was forced to give up her new baby and place him into care. The whole story is infuriating.

Fantasy

I don’t reach much fantasy because I often find it too trope heavy, reliant on plot over character for my taste, and I find a lot of world building quite tedious.

7. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin- Fantasy is a tricky genre because it can be heavy with tropes and too much world-building I find tiresome, and it tends to favour plot over character. This series is character-first first which is why it worked for me, at the core, it’s about people, and they just happen to be in a world with dragons and white walkers.
8. Gardens of the Moon by Stephen Erikson – Malazan is so far out my comfort zone it’s another dimension (high fantasy obtusely written), but this first book I did overall enjoy despite my frustrations with it. Sadly, this book is the least “Malazan” of the 10 book series, and I had a terrible time with books 2 and 3.

Classics

Sometimes archaic language can be hard work.

9. Persuasion by Jane Austen – I’ve grown to really love this, but it was tough to get going with it because the extremely conversational writing style I found very difficult to get into the rhythm of. In fact it took an audiobook (in which the narrator struggled at times) to really unlock it for me.

Character

Sometimes a book might be written in a point of view that I find difficult.

9. All That Man Is by David Szalay – This is a collection of short stories from the perspective of 12 different men at different life stages across Europe. The male POV was extremely uncomfortable, and I found it very depressing, but I gained an appreciation for it after discussing it at my old book club with the male members of the group. The women hated it, and the men loved it.