Books that are underrated and shouldn’t be

Have you been wondering what to read lately? Three of our writers tell you about books they think are underrated and why you should give them a go!

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

I have to admit that even I was slightly daunted by the prospect of reading The Count of Monte Cristo...and I love long books! At 1,000 plus pages, it certainly doesn’t seem to be light reading, and just carrying it around could qualify as a workout.

However, by the time I had finished the gripping first section, which alone has enough plot twists, melodrama and shocking moments to rival any soap opera, I was hooked. I even grew to appreciate the seemingly irrelevant tangents in the narrative and how they add to the intricacy of the novel, particularly the chapter entitled “How to rescue a gardener from dormice who are eating his peaches” (yes, really).

If you like stories about betrayal, elaborately planned revenge plots spanning decades and morally ambiguous antiheroes (with a touch of dark humour), this is the book for you.

Seeta Parmar

Stolen by Lucy Christopher

A critically acclaimed, yet seemingly unheard of novel, Stolen, is a young adult fiction, of a 16 year old Gemma, who was kidnapped from an airport in Bangkok and being helped captive in the Australian Outback by 24 year old Ty.

The tale is a spine chilling and toe-curling story of how Gemma at first resents her captor, then begins to understand him, and finally ends up falling in love with him. Their bittersweet love story has a bittersweet ending, as he ends up releasing her, and that is where Gemma starts her story, reminiscing of her forbidden love.

This book is incredibly underrated and a must-read, as it beautifully and heart-achingly captures the turbulent and conflicting feelings of Stockholm Syndrome unlike any other captor-victim story I have read. It gives a compassionate and sympathetic insight, and one ends up rooting for the twisted couple.

It beautifully and heart-achingly captures the turbulent and conflicting feelings of Stockholm Syndrome

When the tale ends, the reader is snapped back to reality, making one feel like they were not just reading, but actually in the story, as the victim, in love with the forbidden lover. Any novel that can transport me to such a dark and tainted love story is one I would read over and over again.

Maheen Rizvi

Glass Family stories by J.D. Salinger

Everyone bookish knows J.D. Salinger for The Catcher in the Rye, a novel as innate to teen angst as My Chemical Romance and skinny jeans – so it makes me feel embarrassingly immature when I cite him as one of my favourite writers.

But as The Catcher in the Rye ‘got’ me as a 15 year old, Salinger’s later Glass Family stories get me now. It is a disparate scatterings of novellas and short stories concerning seven siblings who grew up as minor celebrities for their intellectual precociousness and found themselves as emotionally ill-adjusted, lost adults.

Their stories brim with charm, wit, philosophical wonder and gorgeous, heartbreaking melancholy. You’ll have felt their influence in any representations of twee, intellectual New Yorkishness (Vampire Weekend?) and the sibling relationships collapsing under so much contradicting love and hatred in Wes Anderson films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited.

If you want a beautifully crafted mirror to the experience of being in your twenties and feeling utterly adrift, or of trying to simply trying to hold your own as one of many siblings, I highly recommend these books.

Rory McCarthy

Image Credits: Flickr / Robert (Header)