Have you ever come across a book you never planned on reading or even giving
a second glance at, but then suddenly 'Discovered' it?
This has happened to me on a few occasions.
Probably the most notable for me was with _War and Peace_.
I'd always heard how it was a 'great book' and had much to offer someone if
they took the time to read it.  Unfortunately I was put off by the size of
the book, not to mention I didn't have much of an interest in the war of
which much of _War and Peace_ took place.
Somehow I started reading the book.  Then it got pushed aside after maybe
about the first fifty pages.  I don't know what it was but months later
I came back to the book.  
This occured several times, until probably about the mid section of the book,
when I finally started reading it regularly until I finished it.  It took
me over one full year to read that book, and in the end I had 'discovered' it.
There are indeed many treasures in its pages which, simply by not planning
to approach the book, I might have overlooked in the end.
I'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience, and come to love a book
simply because they didn't plan on it.

39 responses total.

This has happened to me innumerable times.  In fact, there are a lot of books
I acquired by marriage and which looked uninteresting to me but proved
*wonderful*.  None come to mind at the moment ... what *does* is something
a little different.  Around 20 years ago I was with some friends (at a
party), & they all decided to watch a segment of a TV special on the
Holocaust.  I didn't want to - I was already feeling somewhat depressed
with no outside help - so I browsed on the bookshelves at the house we were
at looking for some light reading.  Aha!  There was a book by C.S. Lewis
that I'd been meaning to read for some time.  Well, it was _That Hideous
Strength_.  To this day I'd maintain that it's a reasonable candidate for
Lewis's best book, but I think that TV special would not have been more
depressing.

That happened to me with Gibbons' _Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_. It was always touted as the ultimate *unreadable* book, but
for reasons I can no longer recall, at age ca. 22, I picked up volume
1 (of 12), and was trapped. Gibbons is both witty and wry, keeps 
historical personalities in the fore, loves the ironic, and doesn't
get lost in the details (often....). My hero became Belisarius (505-
565), general to Justinian, as unlikely as that may sound. But Gibbons
treated him with great sympathy. Would I read it again? Uh oh....

Heh.... interesting you should mention that.  I've had the notion of
someday reading those 12 volumes.  Maybe I might make a discovery.

One of my favorite discoveries is Cully Gage.  A friend once mentioned
_The Northwoods Reader_, and I was completely fascinated by the stories.
I could easily picture myself sitting around a campfire up north 
listening to a native Yuper reminisce about the "old days."

I liked it so well, I got _Tales of the Old U.P._, _Heads and Tales_,
_The Last Northwoods Reader_, and _What? Another Northwoods Reader_.

"They laughed when I said, read Gibbons."

I was floored, some years ago, by the power and beauty of essays on trout
fishing that Zane Grey wrote back in the '20s.  They were simply
terrific.

I ended up fishing for Steelhead with fly rods, because of Grey.

(I *never* understood War and Peace.)

Did you read the whole thing?  What translation?

Yes, I read the whole thing.  No, I have no idea which translation, but
it must have been very poor.  I kept getting distracted by all the weird
variations on diminuitive names -- so I never knew who was speaking
or who was being spoken about.  It was many years ago, but I remember
thinking, "This is supposed to be good.  Surely, it will get better."
It never did.

You mean somebody else here has read more c s lewis than that unreadable
mess he calls the chronicles of narnia?  That hideous strength is my
*favorite*  (try perelandrea and out of the silent planet too)

I've made discoveries like those above through lit classes when I was in
school--I'd think "great, another dry book to dissect", and end up loving
it and re-reading it.  Not every time, of course, but often.  I discovered

Wuthering Heights that way, and also the whole wotks of Dorothy Parker, 
who's since been my favorite author to read when in a bad mood--I always
laugh at her sarcasm.  I remember one English class, too, where everyone
but me "discovered" Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.  I still can't get 
through it!

My experience with Story of 2 Municipalities was ruined by whomever
wrote "Gaspard killed the Marquis" inside the front cover of my book.

_A Tale of Two Cities_ was too long for me, so I listened to 
it on cassette.  Is that cheating?

I had a free afternoon on a business trip to Chicago a few years
ago, so I walked over to Rizzoli's book store in Watertower Plaza
and browsed around.  There was one book with a picture of a glass
of wine sitting on a table outdoors, with a wasp crawling up the
glass.  The book was called _Love Always_ by Anne Beattie.  On a
whim I bought it and took it back to the Drake where I was staying.
I've been a Beattie fan ever since.

dc--If memory serves me, I bought the Cliffs Notes and watched the movie.
For a bookworm like myself, that's  an indicator of a really bad book.  
Are there any Dickens fans out there?  If so, why?  I'm not being
sarcastic or anything I would just like to know what is appealing about
his writing.

One of my professors did his dissertation on the plays of Caryl Churchill
(a contemporary English playwright).  He had been talking about her one
day in class, and a week later I found one of her plays (_Serious Money_)
in a bookstore.  So I picked it up and read it and loved it, as with the
rest
of her work.  But I probably never would have read her if my professor
hadn't mentioned her in class

I read a lot of Faulkner for the same reason: the prof was a Faulkner
authority, and made Faulkner's work come more alive.

Speaking of Faulker, here's a minor find:

"The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer" by Tom Dardis, 1989.

  This well written book has essays on Faulkner: "Civilization begins with
distillation", Fitzgerald: "Bluer skies somewhere", Hemingway: "I'm no
rummy", and O'Neill: "Turn back the universe, and give me yesterday".  The
subject of these long essays i s apparent from the title, and amount to
short biographies that try to give alcohol its due in each author's life.

  
  From the introduction:  ..."many American writers were convinced that
they had benefited richly from their early pact with alcohol and remained
asssured that it had been a necessary  ingredient in the brief yet golden
period of their youth.  This, despite the fact that the muse of alchohol
became increasingly deaf to the pleas of these writers as they aged."...
  
  ..."That Faulkner drank heavily all his life is no secret, but the
effect of it on both the man and the books he wrote after 1942 is not well
known.  His continual hospitalizations, the blackouts and the electroshock
therapy he received did little to curb his thirst.  The immense body of
work he created between the late 1920's and the beginning of the 1940's is
amazing considering the intense physical handicap he labored under because
of his drinking. One may well ask, When and how did he find the time to
write the books?
  Faulkner's principal biographer, Joseph Blotner, ascribes his
subject's heavy drinking to his need for temporary oblivion from the world
around him.  Blotner views the prolonged binges as experiences that
Faulkner chose of his own accord, something *willed*.  Yet it is clear
that Faulkner did *not* will his binges - they were far too painful and
damaging for that.  He was always surprised to find himself back in the
hospital.  The bouts of drinking were, in effect, the inevitable results
of a disease over which he had little or no control.  Faulkner drank
alcoholically for nearly fifty years and remained confident to the end
that his extraordinary powers derived, at least in part, from alcohol. 
When Faulkner remarked that "civilization begins with distillation," he
was not joking but stating what he believed to be self-evident: a writer
requires the liberating infusion of whiskey in order to reveal the nature
of the world around him.  Sadly, nearly all the best American writer of
this century have agreed with him.

  In his early days Faulkner made no bones about his drinking, once
telling an interviewer that he always kept his whiskey within reach as he
wrote. He seemed invulnerable to alcohol in the great early period of "The
Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying", but by the mid-1930's his body
began to revolt against the huge amounts of liquor he consumed daily. 
When only thirty-eight, he discovered the other, unfriendly side of
alcohol, the destructive side that produced confulsive seizures, a score
of hospitalizations and, in time, an erosion of his talent."...
  

My mother is a juvenile (brittle) diabetic, and she often talked
about Banting and the discovery of insulin. She is sort of
science-phobic, and I always said I would try to find out
more about it, but didn't really pursue it. Last year I finally
got around to doing what I said I would do and read a book
titled (surprise) THE DISCOVERY OF INSULIN. It is an excellent
book about scientific discoveries, using the discovery of insulin
as a case example. Along the same lines, another book titled
A CONSPIRACY OF CELLS is very good (Rane knows about this one).

Who is the author of these books, Jill?  And can you recommend any other 
good ones on diabetes in general?  My fiance is a diabetic as well, has been
for 25 years, and I am always on the lookout for good, readable info as 
opposed to the tomes aimed at doctors.  Anyone's insight on this would be
appreciated--if you'd rather mail than post it, that's fine with me.

I'll get the citations for you. THE DISCOVERY..... is not a book
about coping with/controlling diabetes on a daily basis, if that's
what you're looking for. However, it is very readable history of
science.

Here's the cit. info.
Bliss, Michael.1982.THE DISCOVERY OF INSULIN. Univ. of Chicago.
ISBN:0-226-05897-2 (also available in paperback)
 
Gold, Michael.1986.A CONSPIRACY OF CELLS.SUNY Press, Albany.
ISBN:0-88706-099-4 (also in pbk.). I have seen this one
in the med. section in the Dawn Treader on South U.

Thanks, Jill! I am taking my diabetic to the doctor tomorrow, and I think I'll 
swing by the library and pick it up for some waiting-room reading.  

Gold's book is not about diabetes, it is about a very hardy
group of cancer cells  named HeLa that are giving  (were
giving, I don't know what the situation is presently) the
NIH and cell labs fits. I found the book exceptionally
interesting (this terminal is giving *me* fits).

_Conspiracy of Cells_ belongs in the mystery-thriller category. I
would think they can now scan routinely for HeLa cells. Sort of like
the _Andromeda Strain_, for a while.

Those are the cells from some woman who had cancer, and now her cells are
invading cancer research centers all over the world, right?

That is correct. Her cancer cells were very valuable in cancer research,
but they got loose, and many cultures of supposedly other cell lines
were replaced by HeLa cells without the knowledge of the researchers.

NOT the sort of thing I'd like to become known for..  :-)

damnit! i cant remembe which item someone asked this qy\uestion in, but i was 
talking about a book titled "We" and I think rcurl asked what the copyright
date was on it......the earliest date I found was 1924
thank you and good night  :)

Not me....

 Several books come to mind here:

  Elmer Gantry- Started so slow and boring that I put it down and started
reading it a part at a time. Now that I have plodded to the middle of the
book, it's starting to get really good and harder and harder to put down.
I'm now reading it a chapter at a time before I go to bed and sometimes just
one chapter won't be enough.
 My American Journey by Colin Powell- The same here, almost except there are
some really funny and interesting parts, but now that I am in the section when
Colin is in the Reagan white house, it's beginning to get a little tedious.
It's pleasant to read, mind you, but you have to force yourself sometimes.
I'm also learning that Reagan wasn't all that he appeared to be.

  I like Dickens, but you really have to be into it to stick it out. That guy
wrote like Wagner wrote his music. "Exciting minutes and boring half hours."
to paraphrase a music critic. I'm about 1/4 of the way through David
Copperfield, and I don't know how I'm gonna read the others that I have.

 I have also found this to be true of Michener, although I know to give him
300 pages to get going, and Clavell who will probably take 500. Like I said
in an earlier item, I have reading material for at least 25 yrs.

I've made several discoveries over the years.

If On a Winter's Night, a Traveller, by Italo Calvino - I took an English
class at U of M just so I could finally read Wuthering Heights. I loved the
book, but this metanovel was so wonderful that I've read it twice since.

The Eight by Katherine Neville - I very rarely read anything my mom does, but
she gave me a copy of this book after she read the library copy. It was a
wonderful blend of magic and history that few authors have matched.

The Embedding, by Ian Watson - I used to buy a lot of books at a SF shop in
Stratford. I loved going there because I could find British editions of books
unavailable here. On this particular trip, I bought 3 Watson books. This was
the first one I read. It was amazing! I never knew that someone could use
linguistics to make an engaging story. It was my introduction to "soft" SF.

I tried _War and Peace_ once, but stopped b/c I just didn't care aabout the
characters.  I haven't tried Dickens very often, but I don't remember having
trouble with it when I did.

When I picked up _A Spell for Chameleon_, I thought it looked interesting,
but I didn't know I was getting myself into a 20+ book trip through Piers
Anthony's world of Xanth!  (Er, it was about a dozen at the time, but it's
now past 20, and counting.)

I was making an effort to read some "classic" SF when I started to read both
_DUNE_ and Asimov's _Foundation_ series.  I really enjoyed both.

As well you should: both are stand-alone classics.

"A Spell For Chameleon", now.. Yeah.. He writes so that the story can be
ENJOYED "stand-alone", but.. Personally, I found them better in a series.

Another author that deserves notice for a series that you have GOT to
follow is Leo Frankowski's "CrossTime Engineer".. (Yah have to 'feel' for
the poor bastard.. Incurring Captialism to defeat Feudalism and to so
achive Socialism! ;-) I've kicked Goroke ever year, since he KNOWS Leo, in
hopes we get another in the series..

I'll think about it.  I'm trying not to get involved in too many series.  My
next project involves mainly stand-alone books, mostly not SF:  I'm tackling
the list of 100 books that Modern Library says everyone ought to read.

I liked _Great Expectations_ when we read it in English last year. I think
the feature of it that I liked most was Dickens' eccentric characters and
quirky sense of humor. it also had a couple of neat (if unlikely) plot 
twists.

I just picked that one up from the library yesterday; haven't started it, yet.

The book, that I am reading at the moment is one of thoose books, started by
just looking at them. I was not interested in Sigmund Froid but... By just
reading two pages it became interesting for me, because I like those
psychology things that he is writing about. If you have the chance, read a
book writen by Froid. If you are interested in this write me a few lines on
my Grex e-mail or on Cappa_G@myway.com

Actually it's not Froid, because in english it's spelled as Freud

But "Froid" is cool.

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