This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for Top Ten Books That Were Totally Deceiving.
1) What Is the What by Dave Eggers: No really… what is the what? Great book, but the title is a bit confusing.
2) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: I felt like people thought I was reading a marriage self-help book whenever they glanced at the cover.
3) Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud: It’s the memoir of the author’s childhood in Morocco with her sister and hippy mother, but it sounds like some weird S&M book.
4) A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick: I thought this was going to be a lot more history and a lot less romance novel.
5) The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst: The summary, the title, I couldn’t really get a good grasp of what the plot was about until I read it.
6) A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess: At this point, most people have a good idea what this book is about, but what a weird title! I can’t imagine trying to figure it out when it was first released.
7) Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian: To be honest, I still don’t know why this book has this title. I remember the whole story, but not how the title connected in.
8) Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: Go ahead, read the title and then find the summary (Snowman and a post-apocalyptic world), then you explain it to me. It was not what I was expecting at all.
9) Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli: The title of this story, about an orphan living in Poland during World War II, has nothing to do with the book at first glance.
10) The Ha-Ha by Dave King: It makes sense what you read it, but I didn’t know what a Ha-ha was before this. I thought maybe the author was referring to a joke or something.
