Last week I read a book that I had been looking forward to for what seemed like forever. But when I picked the book up it seemed like it wasn’t as good as I expected and it was falling a little flat for me. Was it the book? Was it me? I started to think that my anticipation of the book was getting in the way and my expectations were probably a little high. Now with this particular book I found that once I got to the middle of the story it began to meet those high expectations I had put on it and ended on a good note. But how often do I do this? How often do I look forward to a book so much that I find that it doesn’t live up in the end?
I think this happened to me for the first time with JR Ward’s book Lover Revealed. I was loving the series and the first three books in the BDB are my favorites. I was so looking forward to reading LR I couldn’t see straight. But when LR came out and I picked it up it fell flat. Ok, it didn’t just fall flat for me it was like at the bottom of the ocean. It’s still, to this day, my least favorite book in the series (wait, I forgot about Phury’s book. Um, ok, they run a close race on the least fav award). But was it the book or was it that I expected too much based on previous books? IDK.
Not long after I started thinking of it, I saw that Jenre had a very similar question put out into the ether on her blog about expectations clouding your judgment of a book. Great minds think alike and all that. lol But her question was more to the point of you looking at other peoples thoughts or ratings and getting your expectations up that way. I think for me this was more a personal anticipation of books in a series or even a new series/book by a much loved author that I’m looking forward to.
So what are your thoughts? Do you think that the your anticipation might ruin your enjoyment of the book?