10 Books That Surprised Me

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This week’s prompt is for books that surprised me, which can be good or bad. This is a mix, but most of them were good surprises.. with a few, you’ll be sick of me ranting about!

1. Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas – I didn’t think I’d like this! I’d never been a historical romance fan, and the cover was so sickly looking I would never have picked it up if I hadn’t decided to try the series because they’re called “The Wallflowers!” I could barely put it down, and I flew through all the other books in the series too; they’re now favourites I’ll re-read! Kleypas can really write a convincing romance with genuinely romantic scenes (books 1 and 3 are the best)!
2. Piranesi by Suzanna Clarke – This book is so original and so well written! I’ve never felt so in the dark while reading and yet been gripped. It is a book to go into knowing nothing and enjoy the mystery and the surprises!
3. Penance by Eliza Clark – This book is a slippery one! It had me on my toes with the unreliable narrator, but it still got me good with a rug pull right at the end! I’m still thinking about it!
4. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte – This is a funny one because it turns out that despite this being a Classic and despite my having an English Lit. degree… I didn’t actually know what it was about! I thought that Heathcliffe was a romantic hero, I thought this was a tragic romantic story! I could not have been more wrong, this is a book about petty (yet extreme!) revenge and I was not prepared for how fucking brutal, cruel and violent it is!
5. Paris: The Memoir by Paris Hilton – So I knew a bit about Paris’ “rebrand”, having watched her documentary on YouTube about the Troubled Teen Industry (it’s very good and surprisingly jarring to hear her speak in her real voice!) but even so I was surprised by how good this memoir is! It is not your typical celebrity memoir; it’s written in her voice, and her stories jump around in the way her ADHD brain does. It is especially good if you get the audio version, which she reads. It’s not an easy read… she describes some very harrowing experiences from her time in the TTI industry, in particular. Even if you have no interest in Paris Hilton (which I didn’t!), this is a very interesting read, and I find these “hiding in plain sight” stories fascinating.
6. Period Power by Maisie Hill – This book surprised me by being a self-help book that actually did ✨change my life!✨ This book helped me – at the age of 35 – to understand my own body, and honestly, this is invaluable information that girls should be taught in school! I now understand my changes in energy, mood, focus, motivations, libido and even my skin and what they mean… and that nothing is wrong with me! Genuinely, my life is so much better after reading this book (it’s also why I’m always mentioning my menstrual cycle!)!
7. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller – I really thought I’d at least like this, I even bought it in paperback, spending £3 on it, that’s 3x how much I normally spend on new books! I am convinced everyone else has a different book than I because I hated this so much. I’m at an absolute loss as to what everyone finds so romantic and emotional. I found it punishingly dull, and the characters are so flat!
8. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero – I absolutely love the movie The Room. It’s a work of mad genius, it’s an absolute masterpiece of a terrible movie. My brother also loves it, and I bought this for him for Christmas one year, but before I gave it to him, I ended up reading the one sitting in a single day (I can get away with this because I don’t break book spines!)! This book is fascinating and hilarious. The movie itself might be strange, but the story behind it is even more bizarre, and it’s told by the guy who played Mark in the movie! They also made a movie from this book!
9. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness – This one was a reminder that I need to read reviews before picking up anything new… and also don’t trust a book’s cover! This book was not what I expected, it has hardly any witches in it and actually it’s a fucking vampire romance that reads like YA just with adult aged characters acting like teenagers. The main character is an embarrassment to women in their thirties (and she’s supposed to be an academic!). What was also surprising about it was actually a fun hate-read!
10. The Enemy by Charlie Higson – This is a YA zombie series, written by the guy from The Fast Show, and its fucking fantastic! In a world where everyone over the age of 15 has been turned overnight into zombie-like creatures, this series has depth, complex characters, a really well-considered and believable world and surprisingly high stakes. This series is a testament to the fact that books for the teen market do not need to talk down! It’s also a seven-book series that gets better as it goes, each one expands the world and builds to an epic plot! I think any adult (who likes zombie stories) would enjoy these, I read them all when I was 25 and was pleasantly surprised by how consistently good they were. Probably the best Young Adult fantasy books I’ve ever read.

Were you surprised by any of these? Are you surprised that I was surprised I hated two extremely popular books? Any other The Room fans out there?