# Books you never expected to like



## Violanthe (Oct 17, 2006)

What book were you reluctant to read, but ended up loving? What preconceptions made you reluctant to pick it up? What surprised you and why did you end up liking it so much?


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## YayGollum (Oct 20, 2006)

The first and least stretched example of such a book would be that The Fellowship Of The Ring book, for myself. I only read the thing because I had heard that the story would definitely be turned into movies, and I wished to be one of those snooty people who get to point out all of the mistakes that the movie types made. I wasn't very interested in the thing in the first place mostly because it was just the stuffy old favorite of the parental units I ended up with. I was more (and still am) into science fiction. They didn't attempt to shove the thing down my throat too much, though. I figured that they knew that I would eventually read it, and I was happy to prove them wrong. I have the ability to entertain myself without reading all of those supposed classics. 

But oh well. I wasn't reading anything else especially great at the time, I guess. So what if I've read a few classics? I feel no obligation to read all of them. Hmph! I was readily absorbed into the story, though. Yay for all of the history, a good lived-in feel, with plenty of fun personalities. Not as stuffy as I thought it'd be. Now, all of those other Tolkien writings are as stuffy as I thought they'd be, but I still have the goal of reading all of them. oh well.


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## Varokhâr (Oct 21, 2006)

I was always certain I'd love the _Lord of the Rings_ books and anything by Tolkien. He has never let me down 

But _The Wheel of Time_ series was something I was rather iffy about. It took a couple of years for me to pick up Book One, but when I did, I loved it. I'm now on Book Five


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## Erestor Arcamen (Oct 23, 2006)

Harry Potter series. when i first got Sorcerer's Stone for Xmas, I says, this looks real stupid, and now ive like read every book out 5 times so far lol, almost as much as LOTR (but not as much )


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## Seregon (Oct 23, 2006)

I never expected to like the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony - as with Yay, it was my dad's favorite, so I was sort of suspicious, especiallly because my dad really likes the Battletech seires, and I hate it; once I started reading, though... I couldn't stop. They're excellent.

I also never expected to like a series called a Song of Ice and Fire, which was suggested by Elfy, because it seemed a bit of a Ringsy ripoff, and I'd never heard of the author (George R. R. Martin). I hated the first chapter or two, because it was really hard to get a hold of all of the characters. I couldn't figure out the first chapter until two books into the series. It's really excellent writing, very alike to the style that both I and Elfy have developed (and which we're now trying to get away from), and he's even been declared a modern, American Tolkien. As much as I love Tolkien, I happen to agree. His novels are epic, classic, and wonderfully woven.


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## e.Blackstar (Oct 24, 2006)

The Golden Compass


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## Violanthe (Oct 25, 2006)

I didn't expect to like Bakker's the Darkness that Comes Before as much as I did.


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## Mike (Oct 26, 2006)

"The Once and Future King" comes to mind--the beginning was childish, I believe.

"Conan"--it has such a bad repuation...


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## Neumy (Oct 26, 2006)

"Bridge of Birds" by Barry Hughart

I didn't give it much hope when I picked it up - but after a chapter, I couldn't put it down.


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## Barliman Butterbur (Oct 26, 2006)

Violanthe said:


> What book were you reluctant to read, but ended up loving? What preconceptions made you reluctant to pick it up? What surprised you and why did you end up liking it so much?



My first-year college geometry text.
Geometry!
I could understand it way better than algebra! I loved working with and constructing all the shapes and proving the theorems. It was like being a detective!

Barley


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## Seregon (Oct 26, 2006)

Barliman Butterbur said:


> My first-year college geometry text.
> Geometry!
> I could understand it way better than algebra! I loved working with and constructing all the shapes and proving the theorems. It was like being a detective!
> 
> Barley


 
I'd just like to jump in for a second and say that this is often due to or linked with a high verbal tendency, versus a high mathematical tendency; a high amount of white matter, versus grey matter in the brain - white matter links things together, whereas grey matter is what processes it. People with more white matter are better at communication and getting their thoughts across - writing, reading, talking, etc., whereas people with higher grey matter are better in mechanical, mathematical, and historical fields, sometimes also showing a general higher tendency in Science (which is really more disputable than any of the others). Generally, people with more white matter are female and grey matter are male, yet there are many instances of it being different, and it's probable that a lot of male writers have a higher concentration of white matter.

It's probable that if you took a group of ten people who had read the book itself, five would love it and five would hate it.

I know it's a bit OT, but I thought it may be at least a mildly productive aside.


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## Barliman Butterbur (Oct 27, 2006)

Seregon said:


> ...white matter links things together, whereas grey matter is what processes it. People with more white matter are better at communication and getting their thoughts across - writing, reading, talking, etc., whereas people with higher grey matter are better in mechanical, mathematical, and historical fields, sometimes also showing a general higher tendency in Science (which is really more disputable than any of the others).



This is a fascinating notion. What research can you direct us to on the web that backs it up?

Barley


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## Starbrow (Oct 27, 2006)

Like Water for Chocolate

I received it for Christmas one year from a colleague. It's quite different from my usual Fantasy/SciFi readings. But it turned out to be very interesting.


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## Varokhâr (Oct 28, 2006)

Barliman Butterbur said:


> My first-year college geometry text.
> Geometry!
> I could understand it way better than algebra! I loved working with and constructing all the shapes and proving the theorems. It was like being a detective!



Heh - oh, I so have to agree there


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## Barliman Butterbur (Oct 28, 2006)

Varokhâr said:


> Heh - oh, I so have to agree there



PS: It was the last math class I ever took... 

Barley


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## Seregon (Oct 28, 2006)

Barliman Butterbur said:


> This is a fascinating notion. What research can you direct us to on the web that backs it up?
> 
> Barley


 
Well, most of what I was saying came from some news stories I heard a while back, but in a sinch:

"Male brains also contain a greater proportion of gray matter, the part of the brain responsible for computation, while women have relatively more white matter, which specializes in making connections between brain cells.

Brain-imaging studies suggest that both sexes exploit these differences to their benefit. UCLA researchers have done brain scans of men and women who scored in the top 1 percent on the math section of the SAT. As they worked on math problems, the men relied heavily on the grey matter in the brain's parietal and cerebral cortices. Women showed greater activity in areas dominated by the well-connected white matter. 

"Maybe they're doing the math using the white matter,'' Haier says. "It's not completely unreasonable.'' 

So men and women appear to use their brains differently in some situations. Does that make any difference in how smart they are? 

The short answer is no. Average IQ is the same among men and women. 

But it's the long answer, which considers different kinds of cognitive ability and speculates about how they are distributed among individuals in the two sexes, that has been raised in support of Summers' remarks. 

Intelligence tests have found that men, on average, perform better on spatial tasks that require mentally rotating or otherwise manipulating objects. Men also do better on tests of mathematical reasoning. Women tend to do better than men on tasks requiring verbal memory and distinguishing whether objects are similar or different. The relative strengths even out, so on average the sexes are of equal intelligence.

...

Whatever the reason, researchers have found differences in math ability between males and females from pre-kindergarten through adulthood. 

Vanderbilt University psychologists who have been giving exceptionally bright 12- to 14-year-olds the SAT for more than 20 years have found that boys do exceptionally well on the math side of the exam. In a sample of 40,000 children who took the test, twice as many boys as girls scored above 500, four times as many boys scored above 600 and 13 times as many topped 700. The sexes were equally matched on the verbal portion of the test, which is scored on a scale of 200 to 800. 

That would suggest there are differences between the sexes in innate ability, the Vanderbilt researchers have concluded in various scientific papers."

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/ap_050228_summers.html

I think that just about sums it up.


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## Barliman Butterbur (Oct 28, 2006)

Seregon said:


> Well, most of what I was saying came from some news stories I heard a while back...That would suggest there are differences between the sexes in innate ability...I think that just about sums it up.



Thanks for all the info! Actually, it opens the way for a lot of new research. I have always believed that mereley despite the presence or absence of the X or Y (I forget which) chromosome at fertilization determines the sex, that men and women are profoundly and fundamentally different because survival has hardwired one to bond and give birth, the other to be an aggressive hunter. But that's only the beginning. I think those who argue that men and women are the same except for their looks are incredibly shortsighted and simplistic in their thinking. That silliness just doesn't bear out.

Barley


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## Seregon (Oct 29, 2006)

I completely agree, Barley, (and it's women: XX; men: XY - I remember because I had a science teacher who said that men were mutants because of it.) It's not just chromosomes - it's brain chemistry; they've even found that most to all homosexual men have chemistry more like women (that was from CNN I believe; I can look it up if you want). I think it explains a lot, and proves that it's at least partially genetics/chemistry that determines sexuality.

This post was NOT completely off-topic - I actually have a book to add!

Cold Mountain - I have to read it for English, and expected to hate it. And for the first couple of hundred pages, I did. Then, it was okay for about fifty pages. Finally, I got to page 280 or so, and started liking it. I disliked it at first because it didn't quite have the depth and developement I like in books - where the character is really developed, explained, changed, and made perfectly clear. The book itself (or my version) is 445 pages long. Although, I must admit that I still resent having to read more than half of it for it to get really good. I've heard the same thing from more than a few people.


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## Violanthe (Oct 31, 2006)

That's interesting. I've seen some people bring up this very book in the "books to warn against" topic. To each his own, I suppose.


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## HLGStrider (Jan 18, 2007)

Ivanhoe because my mom wanted me to read it and take notes and answer study questions. What you have to do though when your mother/english teacher tells you to do this is to read well ahead of their study plan and then try to answer the questions from memory. It is more interesting and challenging than reading a list of questions and then trying to discover the answers while picking through a chapter thinking about the character differences between Rebekah and Rowena rather than the story line. 

_Crime and Punishment_. After a bad experience with _War and Peace_ I never expected to be able to tolerate a Russian author again. Fortunately I found a short book by the title of _A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisov _by Alexander Solzenitsyn which was on some suggested reading list and since it was short I figured I could work my way through it faster than the six months it took my to conquer Tolstoy. Try two hours. So I thought, hmmm . . . maybe Russians write good short but lousy long, and C and P was sort of in the middle there . . . so I started cautiously and finished it in about a day and a half. Moved on through _Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Brother's Karamozov, _and a bunch of shorter works such as _The Gambler, The Double, White Nights _(My favorite, I think), etc. Then went back in eternal graditude for Alexander Solzenitsyn for reawakening me to a genre and read _Cancer Ward_. I adored that too. So, yeah, I like Dosteovsky. 

_Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. _The movie (the old one, not the new) gave me night mares when I was little itty bitty so I refused to read it. Then I read it but skipped the Oompa Loopa songs because for some reason at the age of ten I had a thing against long poems in books. Then finally I read it once more for the full effect. I liked it.

_The Hobbit_. Very similar story to Charlie there. The goblins in the cartoon sent me screaming from the room when I was five and I had a long memory. So I had to read Narnia first (which I also didn't want to read because the pictures on the front were scary and I had this thing about being scared when I was little. I really didn't like it.) and then find out that Tolkien and Lewis were friends to be willing to take up that book (at I think 11 or 12) and find out that it was more fantastical than scary.


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## yhwh1st (Jul 3, 2007)

Please don't ban me from this board! 

Lord of the Rings is one of the bigger books I was just sure I'd hate. I had thought it was a sci-fi and I don't like sci-fi.  My friends and cousins were all telling me I had to read them. They were the best books _ever_. yada-yada-yada. So I decided to oblige simply to get them off my back. I picked up The Hobbit, finished it in two days, and the rest is history.

Another is Jane Eyre. It was given to me as a Christmas gift and I read it simply because it was a gift. That's another one I finished in fairly good time.


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## Halasían (Jul 18, 2007)

Interesting that some mention *Lord of the Rings* here. I remember when I was in high school I was into Asimov (Foundation) and Hassel (Wheels of Terror), when my neighbor mentioned he was reading *The Hobbit*. I didn't think I would be interested in it but he convinced me I should give it a go. I did, and after a slow start, I decided to plow my way through it to get it done and say I read it and wasn't much into it. But I _did_ get into it! It sucked me right into Lord of the Rings! So I was pleasently suprised.

Another book I didn't expect to like was *The Black Company*. "Moonbiter", a username of a guy I knew from a couple of other message boards ranted and raved about how great the Black Company books were. Needless to say I was reluctant to believe him. One day I saw the first three books at a yard sale and got them, and a year after that I began to read the first one fully expecting to not get into it. The first two chapters didn't really do anything for me, and after a few months I started on the third chapter, and it actually got interesting to me! I then read the other nine books of the series. I wasn't expecting to like them, but ended up liking them!

Now on G.R.R. Martin's _Ice & Fire_ series, I had the opposite happen... I got the books expecting to like them, but couldn't get into them even after trying to plow my way through them.


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## yhwh1st (Jul 19, 2007)

That's sort of what happened to me with The Killer Angels. I got part way into it and didn't like it, but I had to finish it for a class. By the end I cried (sort of a sad book) and _loved_ it. I actually just bought it too!  I own nearly 200 books (170-something I think). Just in case you couldn't tell, I like books.


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## HLGStrider (Jul 19, 2007)

I guess "Crime and Punishment" falls into this catagory. A. because I had just read "War and Peace" shortly before and hated it and even though they are from different authors, they seemed connected in my mind somehow. I have since become a rabid Dosteovsky fan. 

There were several books I was reluctant to read growing up because movie versions or cover designs scared me when I was little. These include "The Hobbit," "The Magician's Nephew," and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Needless to say I was a very impressionable child . . . Most of them are now personal favorites.


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## Violanthe (Jul 24, 2007)

I ultimately enjoyed but had a good deal of trouble reading LOTR the first time around. I think I would have enjoyed it more on audiobook, and maybe if I'd read it at a younger age.


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