Top 5 books that surprised me

Let’s start with the simplest kind of surprise. I didn’t think I was going to like this book.

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy before I’d even read it, obviously. Something about it just didn’t scream ‘Meeghan book’ to me, and I went in with fairly modest expectations.

Reader, I was wrong.

Instead, I found this wonderfully strange mixture of fantasy, romance, humour, death and loneliness that somehow worked. The world was unusual enough to keep me curious, while Hart and Mercy gave me exactly the kind of emotional character story that will get me every time.

It’s always lovely when a book lives up to enormous expectations. But there’s something particularly delightful about discovering a book you never expected to love at all.

I thought Wolfsong was going to be a werewolf book. And yes, before anyone points out the obvious, I am completely aware that it is a werewolf book.

But I’d expected something much more generic: werewolves, romance, probably some pack dynamics and supernatural drama. Fun, perhaps, but familiar.

I was not prepared for the emotional depth of this story. I was also not prepared to leave this book having gone through half a box of tissues and potentially needing a heart replacement. Because mine was now between these covers.

The relationships, the family and found family, the grief, loyalty, and sheer intensity of these characters completely changed what I thought I was reading. The supernatural elements matter, but they’re not what made Wolfsong stay with me.

I expected werewolves. TJ Klune ripped my heart out instead.

Frankly, I should have known better.

Here’s the thing. I genuinely expected to love Wuthering Heights.

It’s one of the great classics of English literature. It’s gothic and dramatic. I was told that it’s romantic. There’s a windswept moor. There’s a famously intense relationship at the centre of it. On paper, there is absolutely no reason this shouldn’t have worked for me.

And yet, I hated it.

Not in an “eh, this isn’t really for me” kind of way. I was surprised by the sheer force of my dislike.

Because, as it turns out, there is a world of difference between a romance story and a book influenced by the Romantic movement. Romanticism wasn’t really about romance at all. Think Byron: wild landscapes, intense emotion, untamed nature, rebellion, MORE intense emotion, and deeply dramatic people being tormented by their own existence.

Basically, if everyone is having an absolutely terrible time but they’re doing it passionately on a windswept landscape, Romanticism would like a word.

I know now that Catherine and Heathcliff aren’t supposed to be a model for healthy romantic relationships, and I’m not criticising the book because literally every single character in it makes terrible choices. Give me complicated, damaged and morally questionable characters any day. As we’ve already established, I’ll happily support fictional wrongdoings. Like stabbing.

But I need to find something compelling underneath all that dysfunction. And something does not equal misery for all.

Instead, I spent much of Wuthering Heights wanting to grab everyone involved, separate them like misbehaving children, and send them to the opposite ends of Yorkshire until they’d thought very carefully about their behaviour.

I can appreciate what the book is doing. I understand why it’s endured. And I can even kind of (maybe) see why other readers are obsessed with it. I just don’t want to spend any more time with these people. Ever again.

 Sometimes a book surprises you by being far better than you expected. And sometimes a beloved literary classic makes you wonder whether you read the same book as everyone else.

When you pick up a book called Batman: Nightwalker, you make certain assumptions. Mostly involving Batman.

What surprised me about Marie Lu’s take on a young Bruce Wayne was how much of the story’s intrigue comes from its villain.

Rather than simply giving us an early Batman adventure and asking us to watch Bruce gradually become the hero we already know, Nightwalker spends time exploring the person on the other side of that equation. It made the conflict more interesting because I wasn’t just waiting for Bruce to save the day.

And honestly, that’s often what I want from stories involving heroes and villains. Tell me why.

Give the antagonist motivations that make sense to them. Make me understand how someone ended up on the opposite side of the hero rather than simply informing me that they’re evil. Show me the hero wavering in their beliefs.

I went in expecting Batman. I came out thinking about the villain.

And then there’s Pen Pal.

How exactly does one discuss why Pen Pal was surprising without completely ruining Pen Pal?

Carefully. Very, very carefully.

This book is a genre mash-up in a way I wasn’t expecting at all, and every time I thought I’d worked out exactly what kind of story I was reading, it shifted underneath me again.

Romance? Yes.

Something darker? Also, yes.

Something else entirely? I plead the fifth. (Not that we have this in Australia, but I’m still pleading it.)

What matters is that the way everything eventually comes together completely reframed the story I’d been reading. It’s the sort of book where reaching the end makes you mentally flick backwards through everything that came before it and reconsider what you thought you understood.

Did I expect any of that when I started? Absolutely not.

And that’s precisely why it’s here.