Top Ten Tuesday is a fun meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish for folks who love books and lists. Every week they come up with a different topic on which to go all listy.
This week's topic is about those books that don't grab you right away and may even put you off. These are the books that make you worried about the 50 or 100 page rule that you might have for deciding when you might give up on a book that isn't engaging you. How many of those that you've given up may have turned out to be fantastic? But lets just slide on past that steaming bowl of anxiety and focus on the books that I either thankfully stuck with or that perhaps I should have let go but stuck with, ignoring the 50 page rule when I shouldn't have.
These are the ones I'm glad I stuck with:
1. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (my review)
This one did not grab me right away but ended being a fantastic book. I was listening so I'm not sure how many pages it took before I got interested but the equivalent of a couple of a c.d.s.
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot (my review)
This was a book that I would have likely given up on if I was reading print rather than audio. It's long and drags in places but is ultimately very rewarding and a great book.
3. The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
This is the first book in one of my favorite series of all time. The first book is really difficult though. It's obtuse and confusing but sticking with it was one of the best things I ever did. The rest of the books are easier but so, so good.
4. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (My Review)
This was one I started and couldn't get into so put it aside. I picked it up again a couple years later in audio and loved
5. Seven for a Secret by Lyndsay Faye (My Review)
This is one where I accidentally read book two before book one. Normally this would mean immediate stoppage but by the time I realized it I was hooked.
Books I kind of wished I had given up on but didn't. Part of why is that all of the below are books well thought of by everybody else in the whole world.
5. Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (My review)
I just thought this book boring and the characters uninteresting.
7. The Devil's Teeth by Susan Casey
For a majority of this book it was an interesting journalistic natural history of the sharks off San Francisco. But then Susan Casey and one of the researchers do all kinds of stupid unethical things that made me want to throw the book at the wall.
8. Blackout by Connie Willis
This book has a 3.81 out of 5 rating on Goodreads and won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for best novel. I thought it was a great idea but one of the more tedious books I've ever read.
9. A Discovery of Witches Deborah Harkness (My Review)
This one has a 3.98 average rating on Goodreads. I was digging it initially for maybe the first 100 pages or so but then it went in so many directions I did not like. I was too far in to stop and I kept having hope it would get better.
10. Inda by Sherwood Smith
Another 3.98 rating on Goodreads but this one annoyed the crap out of me. I wish I had chucked it but I didn't.
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