Lit. you thought you'd hate

Is there a type of literature that you thought you would hate but ended up liking? I remember in college I thought I would dislike Medieval literature and ended up enjoying it immensely. I still have my textbooks from that class all those years ago. I also read a book called Sabbathday River that I thought I would dislike because it is a mystery (sort of) and as a rule I don't like mysteries. But I couldn't put this book down. I have been meaning to look at the book again and analyze why I enjoyed it so much: maybe I need to emply some of the author's methods in my own writing!

Have any of you had this experience?

Classic Russian lit. I've managed to avoid it all my life and the last few months have read The Master and Margarita, Anna Karenina and am close to halfway through War and Peace. It really is amazing literature.

Russian lit is amazing.. i never thought i'd go for it but I ended up getting a job there for the summer (really randomly) and I ended up reading a lot of russian literature to get a feel for the history and the country. Now I love it!!

I have The Master and Margarita in my TBD pile right now. Never tackled war and peace! Read gogol, pushkin, dostoyevsky and modern russian literature which is always interesting.

I got to visit Tolstoy's house, i think that was one of my favorite moments there.

I always thought Russian lit would be so heavy and dark (well, War and Peace is heavy -- about ten pounds!!!). But it's often very funny and Tolstoy's characters are wonderful and quirky, the story just hums along.

I wonder how much my US education (or lack thereof) and the milieu around the "evil" Russian empire during the Cold War influenced my perceptions of the lit.

I want to re-read Master and Margarita later this year. I read it the end of 2007 and struggled with it, I was very impatient, but I think a second read would be worthwhile for me. I would approach it very differently the second time around.

I didn't think I would enjoy Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment until I began to read it, and then it was almost like a thriller - I just couldn't put it down. That was years ago. Perhaps I've come to know my own taste in literature too well. I'm more often surprised by finding something dull that I was expecting to enjoy more. When I was younger, I often found myself so deeply pulled into a story that it was like living inside it. That doesn't happen very often for me anymore. Maybe a few times a year. It did with Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin, and also with the Harry Potter books.