I participated in a book club in college and one of the books chosen seemed like it would be boring. I remember not wanting to read it but was committed to the book club so I bought it and read it anyways. The book was called The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

The book really surprised me. It was very historical and set in a kind or Merchant of Venice age.

Here is a synopsis: Barcelona, 1945 – just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

The book was actually very exciting. Daniel had a curiosity that could not be satisfied and needed to find out everything about Julian Carax. It starts out a little slow but eventually becomes a murder mystery and Daniel’s intrigue for more pushes him past boundaries and into places he would never have dreamt of before reading the work of Julian. Th author does like to go very in depth into his descriptions but the book is worth the read in my eyes.

Let me know what book surprised you in the comments! Talk to you soon book worms 🙂