Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! If you’ve ever read a book everyone told you was really good, and thought “really?” when you finally finished it, you’ve been bitten by the hype bug. I think a lot of us have gotten a little gun-shy over the years about the next hyped release! So here are ten books that (at least for me, everyone has different tastes) actually lived up to high expectations!
Jane Eyre: Classics, especially “beloved” classics, have literally hundreds of years of hype. I thought this book was going to be a straightforward romance and was delighted to find a story about a young woman coming into her own that happened to end with marriage. It’s really good, y’all!
War and Peace: I tell everyone I’ve read War and Peace both because it’s a gigantic classic and half the point of reading it is to brag about it but ALSO because it’s honestly an incredible book that people think is intimidating and likely serious and boring and it is long but it is wonderful.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: I resisted this one for a long time because mystery/thriller is not a genre I’ve had particular luck with and I figured that its bestseller status confirmed that it was dumb. Joke’s on me for being snobby, once I read it I raced to get the sequels because I looooved it.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: I remember a list I read several years back that said this was the best book since the turn of the century, which made me raise my eyebrows because it’s a book about dudes writing comic books. How good could it be? The answer is: phenomenal.
The Hunger Games: I don’t read a ton of YA. I’m not trying to sound like I’m hating on it, but I usually find that I’m looking for books with more complex characters/plots and more elegant prose styling for my personally most enjoyable reading experiences. So when this series got a ton of buzz, I kind of wrote it off as not for me and then I raced through all three of them because they’re so good.
Gone Girl: A missing wife. A husband with a secret. Sounds like something you pick up at the airport to read on the plane and immediately forget. But I found myself staying up late and reading while I ate because I didn’t want to put it down and that Cool Girl breakdown is a masterpiece.
Americanah: I read this just recently and there have been years of continually low-level hype about it that made me almost sure it would inevitably disappoint. Nope, turns out it really is that good.
A Game of Thrones: I actually watched the first season of the show before I picked up the books. Though I love The Lord of the Rings, I’d tried reading some other fantasy epics before and they’d just never clicked, but these books are so damn good and I re-read one over the holidays every year and I just want the sixth one nowwwwwwww.
Me Talk Pretty One Day: People love David Sedaris, which had always made me a little wary. Humor can be tricky on the page, and I’ve often found myself reading things that are supposed to be funny and being completely flummoxed. But happily, this book kept me laughing and I’ve picked up several of his other works to read.
Big Little Lies: I literally just posted my review of this last week, so I won’t belabor the point. I read it as the miniseries (which I STILL haven’t watched) was airing and getting raves so I read it at Peak Hype and still really liked it.