Getting It Wrong: When It Takes Time to Appreciate a Book

I am here to admit that I was wrong. Two years ago, when I reviewed The Leftovers, I found myself believing--believing strongly enough to write it down on the internet--that the book did not live up to its full potential. That while it had quiet moments of brilliance, those moments did not add up to something that, overall, was meaningful to me.

Two years later, I'm still thinking about that damn book. Unbidden, it pops into my head. Around the time when certain peoples kept predicting the rapture, I kept thinking about The Leftovers, and the insane, unconsidered consequences that disappearance can have. When three kidnapped girls emerged from Ariel Castor's basement after over a decade in captivity, I thought again of The Leftovers, of the struggle of the girls' families as they fought to cope with something that could never be explained. When I started reading Y: The Last Man, I again went back to The Leftovers, wondering how Perrotta's story might have differed if the disappearances had been consolidated to a specific trait: gender, as in Vaughn's series, or race, or religion, or belief, or geography, or any other characteristic.

I've long said that what I look for most in a book, any book, is its power to live on beyond the last page. Fiction or non, realism or fantasy, it doesn't matter: books make us think, make us reconsider our world and our lives, make us bigger than we were before we read them.

The Leftovers did just that. It just took two years for me to realize it, and the impetus of the upcoming HBO show to crystallize these thoughts. I was wrong, and I couldn't be happier about it. And I also can't wait for the series adaptation.

Have you ever gotten it wrong in your thoughts about a book? Which book?