In January of this year, I was at the very very beginning of getting back into reading and I picked up Secret History. It had been on my shelf for years and I had gotten it out of a neighborhood free library/exchange. Having not been in bookish communities much, I’d never heard of it–I just liked the blurb on the back. I was blown away and when I was telling my friend, an avid reader and lit major, about it, she told me about how it was very well-known as a really good book lol. Now that I’ve built out my own reading habits and book-loving community, I hear about it so often and it makes me chuckle every time.
Have you ever had an experience like this? Picked up a book blind or without knowing much about it, and then found out that it was really popular or loved?
For me this was Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”. Not sure how big the following is compared to these other titles, but it definitely found a devoted audience.
I borrowed this from a library in Japan that had a single shelf of English language literature to choose from. War & Peace was on the same shelf, I eventually read it too out of sheer desperation.