Read These Six BooksJust Trust Us

Books, despite the common adage, are often meant to be judged by their covers. Their jacket flaps include marketing copy designed to entice a browser to buy (and, ideally, read) them, teasing the details of their plot, their mood, or the flavor of their prose. But these careful descriptions, like many attempts to summarize compelling stories, rarely convey the excitement of reading a book that genuinely surprises you. Perhaps a better introduction to a title is not an introduction, a friend saying, trust me, for example. A good book is still great even if you don't know much about it.

In fact, I would venture to say that the sensation of encountering a book for the first time is enhanced by knowing nothing, and that for some books the lack of knowledge seems almost essential to the experience. Some stories come so out of nowhere, or turn so unexpectedly, that their readers should struggle to approach them without any information about what awaits them. Some are genre novels accompanied by the right expectation of shock. Others present themselves as one type of story but turn out to be an entirely different type of story. Due to their presence on this list, you can safely assume that the six titles below will offer many types of twists and turns, but each will richly reward travelers who choose to navigate without a map.

Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi

Readers who came to see Choi's novel Trust Exercise in 2019, when it was first published, had the enviable experience of discovering his narrative acrobatics without preparation. At this point in the book's life, its status as an example of fiction that subverts expectations tells the reader that there is something unusual about it. The first half of the book, set in a competitive performing arts high school in the 1980s, is pure theater kid nostalgia. Two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall in love. The trope of the toxic drama teacher rears its head: David and Sarah's enigmatic drama teacher, Mr. Kingsley, manipulates their emotions and desires in the name of art. The way Trust Exercise turns these events on their head in the second half of the novel, casting them in an entirely different light, is an emotionally unsettling experience that opens up provocative questions about ethics, intimacy, and authorship. The novel delights in hiding easy answers. The title is not simply a play on but a literal description of the book's contents. Let things happen.

Read: In defense of spoilers

Glossary, by Max Barry

This novel is an improbable creature: a high-level thriller about language. Like many literary protagonists before her, Emily Ruff is an orphan recruited by representatives of a mysterious and exclusive boarding school. This teaches the art of coercion. Students who reach the highest level with the title of Poets join a secret and dangerous society that can shape the world through their powers of persuasion. Emily, a smart conversationalist, adapts easily to the rigorous curriculum and becomes a star student. But when she falls in love, the delicate work of wielding language as a weapon is upended by the undisciplined force of desire. Lexicon makes a strong case that genre fiction is the most rewarding form for those who jump into it without prior knowledge. Barry constructs a believable science fiction world, even with his pseudo-fantasy powers, from the most familiar and mundane of building blocks, raising the stakes of linguistic abuse to apocalyptic heights.

From writing, by Stephen King

King's nonfiction craft book, On Writing, ostensibly fulfills the promise of its subtitle: A Memoir of the Craft. King views the book as a sort of resume, mixing autobiographical scenes and practical advice. (One particular tidbit that has stuck with me as a younger writer: Every author has a single ideal reader, whom they must keep in mind as they work.) Still, King can't help but 'use horror. As a child, he was prone to illness and taken to the doctor for painful punctures to his eardrum, which he describes in detail. The terror only grows as King recounts the pitfalls of his adulthood, such as his addictions and then his unexpected and grueling recovery from a near-fatal accident. What begins as a book about writing with personal material woven into it ends up feeling like what else: a Stephen King novel. Readers who come here purely for advice will be rewarded and shaken by the narrative that follows.

Read: How Stephen King Teaches Writing

On writing: a memoir of the profession

By Stephen King

To name the biggest lie, by Sarah Viren

At first, To Name the Bigger Lie seems like a simple coming-of-age story. As a high school student in 1990s Tampa, Florida, Viren falls under the influence of his charismatic teacher, Dr. Whiles, who is intent on making his students question the nature of truth . His pedagogy involves exposing his class, often uncritically, to conspiracy theories that include Holocaust denial. Years later, in 2016, Viren set out to write a book that treats this period of his life as an allegory for the rise of fascism in the United States. But, halfway through writing, his wife, an academic like Virenis, is falsely accused of sexual harassment, and the ensuing Title IX investigation becomes part of Viren's narrative. The surprising convergences that Viren finds between the case and Dr. Whiles' teaching, both of which prove to be dangerous and dangerous ways of trying to get to the truth, culminate in a chilling interrogation of the methods of establishing facts on which our institutions are based.

Naming the Biggest Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories

By Sarah Viren

Natural beauty, by Ling Ling Huang

Huang's debut novel is set in the wellness industry, a breeding ground for bodily discomfort. The narrator, a young classical musician, abandons a promising future as a concert pianist to support her parents after an accident. She accepts a job at a high-end beauty salon, Holistik, which offers unusually effective products. As the narrator becomes more involved with the family that founded the company, she discovers typical clues that something is wrong: evidence of laboratory animal testing and dramatic physical transformations among the customer base. Yet his financial dependence on his work and his growing ties to the founders make it difficult for him to walk away. When the force behind this company's philosophy and practices is finally revealed, it feels both shocking and foreshadowed from the start.

Read: You might be surprised by what scares you

Consent, by Jill Ciment

Ciment has already written about the relationship that drives this memoir. In Half a Life, her 1996 book, she describes her three-decade-old marriage to artist Arnold Mesches, whom she met as a 17-year-old student in his art class. Ciment then presented herself as a seductress. But this book, written after Meschess's death and the #MeToo movement, questions whether things were so clear. The story of their long marriage is more powerful if the reader experiences it without having read the entire backstory or is at least willing to let go of their preconceptions. In Consent, Ciment provides much of the memoir's original context, even analyzing some of its passages, that adhering too rigidly to the first version of this story would make its follow-up too contentious. Such a reading would minimize the complexity of the Ciments calculation. She not only examines how her marriage began, she also honors the productive artistic partnership that resulted from it, while placing these realities in the context of changing cultural mores around power and consent.

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