This morning, I was wondering to myself whether it was ever worth it to try an author again, if you didn’t like the first thing you read by them. Had I ever discovered an author I really liked by doing that?
The answer is yes. I read Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and thought the book was so horrible I didn’t even finish it. I rated it one star on Goodreads and Amazon, but kept her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, on my to read list. I eventually got around to reading her short story collection, and I was completely blown away by it. Five stars for that baby! I read her subsequent short story collection as well, and loved it so much that as I neared the end of the book, I got sad, knowing that once I read the final stories I could never again read these stories for the first time with fresh, unsuspecting eyes.
I absolutely love Karen Russell’s writing, but I hated the first thing I read by her. I think perhaps as I read her novel, I got the suspicion that her writing style was just better suited for short stories than for novels.
Anyways, I was just wondering if anyone else has had this same experience, where they discover an author they really like despite hating their first exposure to the author. Please share!
I imagine a lot of people have had that experience with authors they had to read at school.
For me it was Dickens. Who knew, if you read him with enough life experience to understand the issues he’s talking about, it actually makes a difference!
I’m even thinking about giving that tosser Gatsby another chance…
Dickens was mine too, although I think it was less a matter of getting the life experience than becoming a fluent enough reader not to get bogged down in Victorian syntax. For me, it happened somewhere between ninth and tenth grade.
Definitely Dickens. I hated Great Expectations in school, but when I read it years later, I understood it was truly a great novel.
My first knowledge of Harlan Ellison was Dangerous Visions and I wasn’t particularly impressed by his story in it (though I didn’t hate it). Sometime later, I read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and he became a favorite.
I absolute hate the novels of Patric O’Brian. I have always like stories of navies in the age of sail, and feel that O’Brian, having a great reputation in that genre, should be right down my alley. So I’ve tried at least four times to read one of his books, and cannot get past the first (or maybe the second) chapter in any of them.
I’ve always hoped that he would become a favorite, but no luck. For some reason his writing, to me, is turgid, ponderous, and boring.
I’ve had that experience with music many times, but never with books.
I can think of many albums I love that I hated when I first heard them, but I can’t think of a book I LOVE that I was bored with the first time I read it.
The one author who comes closest is Tolkien. Like every high school nerd of the Seventies, I tried to read LOTR, but unlike my classmates, I got hopelessly bored and gave up around the time Frodo left Tom Bombadil’s house. It was decades before I tried reading Tolkien again.
I liked him much better the second time around, but I’m still not a huge fan of Tolkien or of the fantasy genre in general.
I would say I had that experience with Robert B. Parker. He is the author of the Spenser For Hire private detective series. And let me tell you, he cranked out a metric shit ton of those things (I think there are 40 Spenser novels!). It’s his later works that made me like him, and actually appreciate the Spenser books. The Jesse Stone and Sonny Randall stories are fun reads. He also wrote Appaloosa which was made into a move starring Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris.
I think I’ve posted this elsewhere in the past, but I had to read Jane Austen in school. In each of 2 different years we read 2 of her novels. I found them boring and stuffy, but my teacher had done her thesis on Austen and was a huge fan. Until 15 years later, when I watched a movie version of one of the stories, I didn’t understand her insistence that they were comedies and actually very amusing. Now that I have read them on my own, without someone forcing me to see things I don’t, I love them.
Philip Roth. He comes across as very vein, and most his work is about Jews from NJ, which gets repetitive.
I remember reading Portnoy’s Complaint and not caring for it. Then the last 30 pages were incredible, which just made me dislike him more. If he could write that well all along…
But, I saw the merit and kept reading him. Then I got past the surface and realized what a gifted writer he is. Human Stain is a masterpiece. I got to within 75 pages of the end of American Pastoral and had to stop as he Roth’s portrayal of the Swede’s pain was too much for me. He deserves the Nobel. I like McCarthy and DeLillo a lot, but Roth is the bestg living English language novelist.
Thomas Hardy. I had to read The Mayor of Catsterbridge in 10th grade and hated it. I actually had to buy the Cliff’s Notes.
I didn’t like it (or a lot of Brit Lit) until some teacher undertook to teach us what the hell they were rabbiting on about in the books. WHY did Henchard sell his wife at the fair? Why didn’t anyone stop him? Why did she go along with it? What the hell is black pudding? And all sorts of social norms and real-life trivia that you just have to know to understand stuff from another era.
That same teacher also taught us that Jane Austen was a comedy. And the following year, she taught us all the dirty bits in Shakespeare, which made Hamlet way more entertaining than Romeo and Juliet was, which is just wrong on so many levels.
Charles Bukowski. I read the first half of Ham on Rye hating it so much that I couldn’t put it down. Then, about at the halfway point, I realized that I actually loved it.
I’m glad I realized that, because Post Office is now one of my top ten favorite novels.
I know, right? It felt like rubbernecking around a grisly car accident. It was so enjoyable to complain about how awful it was that I couldn’t stop reading.
Terry Pratchett. I first read him about 1983 when Colour of Magic came out, and it was fairly obviously an attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Hitchhikers, which was huge then. Didn’t like it much, put it down. Make a couple of attempts to read him again over the years, couldn’t get excited over weak fantasy parody at all. Then about five years back I had absolutely nothing else to read, and picked up The Last Hero, which I completely loved, and went back and devoured the entire series, to learn that just about everybody else agreed that his first half-dozen books are about the worst place to start. And I read Colour of Magic again after Pratchett’s death, and my 15 year old self was right; it’s still really not very good.
I was going to say Pratchett as well. A friend gave me a copy of Small Gods, full of effusive praise, and I read it and was bored. Didn’t think much of it at the time.
Then a few years later I picked up a copy of Men At Arms in a bookshop to give myself some reading on a plane, and I got totally hooked.
Have not gone back to see if Small Gods is still boring.
Same here. We read a couple of his in Jr. High - The Pearl and The Red Pony - and I hated them. They were boring and pointless and things died at the end for no reason except to make you feel bad.
My senior year in high school, I took AP English, and we spent the entire semester on East of Eden. It was the first time I ever read a book with an adult (-ish) understanding of things like themes and subtext. That book was a significant factor in my decision to major in English Literature in college.
So when someone asks me why I don’t have a good job at my age, I blame that sonuvabitch, John Steinbeck.