So a while ago I wrote about expectations and how they can ruin a book if they happen to be different then you expected. Well I’m here again to say I now partly disagree with myself. (After all according to Emerson “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”)

The other day I was at the Library and there amongst all the normal teen fiction and fantasy was The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I liked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series (which I read a long time ago) and I like old books, and it just seemed so out of place and refreshingly different so I picked it up. On the cover was a picture of dumb looking old school dinosaurs and the title immediately put me in mind of the movie Jurassic Park. These two things, made me think it would probably be full of description and have a lot of cannon fodder being eaten by giant rampaging dinosaurs. Then the first chapter was about a flimsy, despicable girl that the main character was madly in love with, but who refused to marry a nobody. This started making me very nervous. A whole book about a guy risking his life for a girl that doesn’t deserve him did not give me high hopes.

Well to keep this thing simple: I was wrong about the cannonfodder, the excessive use of dinosaurs, and the love story. And it made the entire story SO much better. Although some of the science  parts were quite unrealistic (because they just didn’t know as much as we know now) all the characters were very well written. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was humorous and intelligent.

Expectations: I guess it just depends on the expectations. If you want something to happen and it doesn’t its depressing. But on the other hand if you think something is going to happen but you hope it doesn’t and then your hope is fulfilled, well that makes for a much happier ending.

Not that this is that profound or anything, but I thought it was interesting.