Books I Was Surprised By (In a Good Way)

Today's Top Ten Tuesday Topic is Books I Liked That Were Outside My Comfort Zone. I only found 6 books. I can think of two reasons for this. 1) I have a pretty wide comfort zone. 2) I don't often read outside my comfort zone and therefore haven't found many I like in that area. But I did find a few.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - I am not usually a huge fan of dystopians. I kind of got my fill of them when the big YA dysopian books came out. I'm not even sure why I picked this on up. But I'm glad I did.

Redshirts by John Scalzi - I don't necessarily dislike science fiction, but this one is set in actual space which is a little to deep into sci-fi for my taste, usually. This one is hilarious, though. It's told from the perspective of one of the guys in the "red shirt" on a Star Trek-like ship. He figures out that the red shirts are the ones who don't come back from a mission.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald - I don't much like birds. I definitely don't read non-fiction books about training large birds of prey. But I resonated with this one. She gets a hawk to help her deal after the death of her father. I read it within a year of the death of my own father. That's all I got. I didn't go on to read a zillion more books about hawking.

Slade House by David Mitchell - Horror. Not usually my jam. This was our book club pick one October and it was short, so I figured if it was terrible, it wouldn't last very long. It wasn't terrible. And the scary parts didn't last too long. It was pretty scary, though.

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn - Flynn is known for her thrillers. Again, out of my comfort zone. I only read this because it was a free gift from Book of the Month and it fulfilled a Read Harder challenge last year. It was pretty good, but I was glad it wasn't longer.

Cold Day In the Sun by Sara Biren - I just read this last month. I'm still shocked at how much I enjoyed it. It is ostensibly a YA romance, but I secretly think it was actually written for middle aged librarians and parents like me, who remember all the music that was mentioned. I don't know how many of today's teens would know all that stuff.

Those are the 6 books that surprised me by being better than I expected for a genre I don't typically enjoy. Got any to put on your own list?