I was just looking up the amazon page for my latest bookclub book, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. The professional review said “astonishing”. It was good, OK? It wasn’t astonishing.
I’m trying to think of any book I ever found astonishing and not coming up with anything. I read a lot of books. I like a lot of books. I am delighted, thrilled, startled, engrossed, and enraptured frequently by books, but I’m just not getting astonished.
I don’t think that word means what they think it means.
I’m going to be sorry I started this thread because people are going to say all kinds of intriguing books that I’m not going to have time to read because of the already existing stack of books.
It occurs to me that I only read books I like. If it’s not grabbing me by page two there are a whole lot of other books waiting (possibly exception for bookclub books, but if I’m hating it I’m not sticking with it). Reviewers have to read books whether they’re enjoying them or not. Perhaps under those circumstances it is astonishing to find one they really like?
Two come to mind for me. The first is Lempriere’s Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk. There’s a section at the beginning where the main character gets a pair of glasses after years of suffering from poor eyesight and the description of changed perspective was very powerful. So much so that I stopped and re-read that section immediately after I first read it.
The second is Atonement by Ian McEwan. There, it was the ending that got me, both in terms of plot and wordsmithing. Just thinking about it now reminds me of how much I loved that back and how I need to read some of his other novels.
The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach – multiple times – the last words of the first chapter, the revelation of the central mystery, and the final lines. Enclave by Kit Reed – the epilogue, which tied everything together. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin – her world and pantheon
Neil Gaiman did it many times during his run of Sandman
The first trade collection of Brian Vaughn’s comic, Y: The Last Man produced the strongest emotional reaction in me of anything I’ve read. Which is kind of odd, because it’s not that great a comic. Decent, worth checking out, but nowhere near the same league as, say Neil Gaiman or Grant Morrison. But the very end of the book,
when we find out that Yorrick’s sister has become an Amazon
literally floored me. And by literally, I really mean literally. I had a genuine physiological response to it. I was too dizzy to stand up, and had a distinct out-of-body sensation, like my consciousness, while still connected to my body, was somehow located about half a foot to the right. I have no idea why that scene affected me so strongly - it wasn’t that great a book, and I ended up giving away the series shortly after I finished collecting it, realizing that my reaction to it was a one-off. Re-reading the first book didn’t have nearly the same punch, and the rest of the series was kind of mediocre.
Another book that floored me, but only figuratively, was James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, but that one was easy to figure out - I read it while I was still in the process of coming to grips with my own sexuality, and reading that book at that time brought up a whole lot of emotions that I’d been trying very, very hard to ignore for a while. Still took a couple of years for me to come out, but that book put a lot of big cracks in the wall for me.
Going even further back, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which I read for an English class when I was a Junior in high school. It was the first book I ever read where I was able to see the subtext on my own, which was pretty mind-blowing at the time. My decision to major in English Lit. when I got to college is directly attributable to that book.
The same reason that some reviewer will be quoted as saying “The scariest book King has ever written!” on the back of EVERY Stephen King book, whether or not the book is scary or indeed intended as horror.
I loved that book. I didn’t necessarily find it astonishing, but I was seriously impressed with her command of the English language. I loved how she was able to capture the very distinct voices of the two narrators without ever sounding forced or stilted, and I love how carefully she writes, so that every nuance of the meanings of words is accounted for.
Actually, it’s funny you open with this example, because when I saw the thread title, another Atwood novel immediately came to mind: The Blind Assassin. That is one of the few books that has ever made me gasp with surprise and leave me with jaw agape over a revelation or plot twist.
I was shocked every time a main character died. The subsequent books didn’t surprise me as much because by then I knew that no character was safe from death. It’s one of the reasons I love the series.
I was plenty astonished by the ending of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal - astonished that he would crap all over the character of Clarice like that.
In High School we were assigned Flowers In The Attic. More astonishing than the incest for me was that our new English teacher thought he could assign it in that conservative snooty St. Louis suburb and not catch a bunch of hell. (He did).
Some books are astonishing, sure - but it’s not often you pick one up as an adult. Usually needs elements of novelty, like you’ve never heard of the writer before and it’s brilliant, or it’s a classic and the sheer quality is just incredible, that sort of thing.
Alias Grace would be one of the least astonishing books I can think of - typically very good novel from a very good (yet consistently over-rated, IMHO) writer. It would be really astonishing if it turned out to be badly written shite.
Real astonishment is something like the last chapter of Ulysses, or the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury. Were you put it down and just say fuck. ing. hell. [If you dislike both these books I guess you’d be saying the same for different reasons :)]
Lot of astonishment in store when you’re young and starting to read seriously, of course. Best days of your reading life when you’re discovering totally new reading experiences.
And I thought immediately of both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood! Both left me gasping multiple times. Perhaps most astonishing to me was the fact that she would ever write a sequel at all, but yeah - “astonishing” is a pretty apt descriptor for me of a lot of Atwood’s work.
Also, I was astonished when I got about 2/3 of the way through A Suitable Boy and realized that Lata is Mrs. Dalloway and that I knew who she’d marry, since I’d just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway for a class while Suitable Boy was my ‘fun reading’ for the semester. . That’s more of a personal, situational astonishment at the intersection. We also read Ulysses, which comes up again and again throughout, so really it was a pretty amazing book to be reading at the time.
Mailman: A Novel by Robert J. Lennon, page after page I was astonished at how well it was written.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Long, sometimes slow and a difficult read for a horror story, but never has the written word grabbed me by the throat like that.