Top Five Wednesday is a book tag started by GingerReadsLainey. Join the goodreads group to get each week’s topic and participate yourselves!
You’re not going to love everything you read. Eventually you learn to be picky and gravitate towards certain genres, specific authors and recommendations from close friends. We all make judgements when we choose to not read a book, whether they be unfounded or not. Sometimes the best thing is to go out of your comfort zone and read something you thought you weren’t going to enjoy. Sometimes it surprises you.
For this week’s top five wednesday topic, Chelsey and I talk about five books we thought we were going to hate but when we finally got around to reading them, realized that we actually really loved them.
5. THE BOOK OF NEGROES – LAWERENCE HILL
It wasn’t that I thought I wasn’t going to like this book. My avoidance of The Book of Negroes was purely based off of a bad experience at a book event. When we were in university Lawerence Hill was having a book signing at our local Chapters. Chelsey wanted to go, but couldn’t get the day off of work so I went for her. I remember standing in line, flipping through Chelsey’s copy of the novel thinking that I really should get around to reading this book. When I got to the front of the line, I changed my mind. I don’t know if Hill was having a bad day, or if there was something going on that I had no idea about, but meeting him was a bad experience. As he was signing the book, Hill was a dick, commenting on if I had never read any of his novels, why was I there. The experience destroyed my interest in his writing and I didn’t end up picking up The Book of Negroes till three years later in a Canadian Literature course. When I did get around to reading it, I loved it. But it took a while to get over that personal ban.
4. WATCHMEN – ALAN MOORE
In my last year of high school I was going through a really big comic kick. I had just discovered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and had also just finished V for Vendetta. The guy I had been dating at the time recommended I read Watchmen. I tried. I got about ten pages into it before I had to put it down. I ended up picking it back up a few months later and really getting into it. I still don’t understand what held me back during my original attempt to read the novel. Had I found it too pretentious? Was I just not feeling super heroes at the time? Had I found the art too distracting? I’m not sure and I will probably never know.
3. DAYS OF BLOOD AND STARLIGHT – LAINI TAYLOR
Chelsey read the A Daughter of Smoke and Bone and found it to suffer from a forced romantic plot. When she finally picked up Days of Blood and Starlight, the focus of the story had shifted to a war in a magical world which our world was sort of interacting with. This of course was everything that she loves in a novel.
2. THE GOLDEN COMPASS – PHILIP PULLMAN
Chelsey’s Mother bought her a copy of The Golden Compass for Christmas one year. She tried to read it and didn’t like it and returned it to the store. A while later another kid gave a book report on the novel and found herself interested in it. She picked the book up and burned through it. The Golden Compass and the rest of His Dark Materials probably mean the same to Chelsey as The Lord of the Rings mean to me. It’s funny how that happens.
1. HARRY POTTER – J.K. ROWLING
When we were both in grade school, everyone was reading Harry Potter. Chelsey had no interest in it. She was a big reader, but she was someone who never got dragged into the BIG TRENDS (meanwhile I was riding the waves of pokemon, pogs and crazy bones right into shore that was Harry Potter) and just avoided everyone’s favourite boy wizard. Everything changed when Chelsey’s aunt bought her one of the books and she gave in and read them. She’s loved them ever since.
So there you have it, our top five list of books that we thought we were going to hate but actually love. What did we learn from doing this? Sometimes you have to take risks and read different things. Also Chelsey was a hipster before hipsters were cool. The ultimate hipster-hipster.
You learn something new every day.
