I don't mean "unexpected" as in plot twist or an interesting fact I didn’t know. I mean a book that actually taught me something I didn't intend to learn. These weren't the Big themes written on the back covers. They were things that snuck up on me while reading and wouldn't go away once I was done with it.
Never Let Me Go made me think about nostalgia in a totally new light. Kathy doesn't remember things because she's sentimental. She remembers because that is everything she has. Memory is a mode of defiance. When your future is taken from you and you feel powerless in the present, sometimes the only way to keep any semblance of dignity is by holding on to the past close enough so it feels tangible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray did not make me consider sin in the manner I anticipated. It made me think about the loneliness of never changing. All the rest of the characters surrounding Dorian grow old, struggle, and learn. He remains beautiful and unblemished. But that perfection cuts him off. And I began to consider whether it is not time that isolates us, but the refusal to allow it to mold us. Is staying the same too long is what truly leaves us alone?!
A Gentleman in Moscow made me think about civility in a way I didn’t expect. At first, I saw the Count’s charm, his rituals, and old-world manners as quiet rebellion, a way of refusing to be reduced by the system that confined him. He never resisted openly, but his refusal to become bitter, his devotion to beauty, and his small acts of care felt like their own kind of protest. Then I started to wonder if that same grace was also a kind of submission. A survival strategy. Something performed to stay intact inside a structure he couldn’t change. I went in expecting to admire his dignity. I came out wondering if dignity is sometimes just elegant compliance and whether those two things can exist in the same gesture.
Housekeeping made me think about how hard it is to grieve when the world doesn’t give you language for your kind of loss. The drifting, the silence, the detachment, it’s not just mourning, it’s what happens when no one tells you how to carry grief that doesn’t follow a script. It wasn’t just about sorrow. It was about being invisible while suffering.
The Left Hand of Darkness taught me a slow, strange education in radical empathy. Not the kind that comes from being aware of an individual's history or beliefs. The kind that only materializes when you sit next to someone long enough so that their foreignness no longer feels foreign.
by glitchychurro
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“From the Corner of His Eye” was my first encounter with an unreliable narrator. I was close to dropping it because I was uncomfortable with how it seemed to be excusing Enoch’s actions, until it suddenly hit me “I’ve been reading this from Enoch’s perspective”. Started the book over again and realized he was a vile piece of shit who saw every wrong he did as excusable.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo helped me understand that people can love you deeply and still be ruthlessly self-serving at the same time. Just because people love you, doesn’t mean they won’t prioritize themselves over your wellbeing. For me personally, love and selfishness are so contradictory in their nature that they cannot coexist. For me, it will always continue to be that way because that is just who I am and how I love. But I needed to understand and accept that this is not the case for everyone. This book helped me with that.
“It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is ruthlessly selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.”
-The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Recently I read a novel called The Vegetarian by Han Kang. It taught me how repression and control can destroy a person, how society labels people as abnormal if they don’t follow their so-called rules and mental illnesses need sympathy and compassion, not judgement.