Ooh boy, I saw this week’s question and let me tell ya, it was easy to answer.

What was the most unusual (for you) book you ever read? Either because the book itself was completely from out in left field somewhere, or was a genre you never read, or was the only book available on a long flight… whatever? What (not counting school textbooks, though literature read for classes counts) was furthest outside your usual comfort zone/familiar territory?

And, did you like it? Did it stretch your boundaries? Did you shut it with a shudder the instant you were done? Did it make you think? Have nightmares? Kick off a new obsession?

When I read this week’s question there was only one book that came to mind, Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. I’ve always enjoyed reading biographies and memoirs, so the genre itself wasn’t so much a “branching out” experiance in and of itself. However, the book itself did in fact push my comfort boundaries to the extreme and reached beyond them. The book was like a horrible accident, I couldn’t stop looking even though my mind screamed to look away. The writing was wonderful, the story told within those pages was captivating. Yet the twistedness of it and the knowledge that it was all real, that was where the shock came in.

When I had finished the book I had very mixed feelings on it. One of the thoughts running through my head at the end of it all was indeed a “That was different!”. But first and foremost was the thought that I couldn’t believe there really were people like that out there and how grateful I was to my mother.

Surprisingly enough, the completion of this book saw a renewed interest in biographies, especially true crime novels. Fiction paled in comparison to the shocking contents that are reality.