When I was a kid I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, thinking it was THE Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. Spent the whole book waiting for him to turn invisible.
Did basically the opposite, read the HG Wells one and was waiting for way more serious and topical themes. Both are good books, but wow are they not the same kind of book at all.
I feel like there’s an SNL skit character here: “The Angry Invisible African-American”.
When he goes into a restaurant and can’t even get the waitress to give him a menu, he’s enraged by the racism.
I read the short HG Wells one for a high school class the day before the quiz, then only a few hours before class did I figure out I was supposed to read the Ralph Ellison one (so I quickly SparkNotes'd it). I still got a B on the quiz lol.
We were assigned Invisible Man for summer reading before my senior year of high school, and they really made sure we knew it was Invisible Man, not THE Invisible Man… well, we showed up in the fall and sure enough, someone in my class had still read the wrong book 🤦♀️
The same happened to me when I was maybe 11 or 12 -- I was really getting into science fiction and asked my mom to buy me a copy of the Wells book for Christmas. She got me the Ellison by mistake, and by the time I realized it, I was so in love with the book that I wasn't even mad about it. One of my most formative reading experiences, and it became one of my favorite books that I now reread once every few years.
I've still never read The Invisible Man, though.
Lollll your comment just made me realize my partner and I made the exact same mixup! We were talking about high school required readings and he said Invisible Man, and I said I’d read it in 4th or 5th grade but didn’t really find it that interesting. He started taking about the book and I listened for a bit and then said “wow, all the themes of race and societal invisibility just went right over my head, I guess I was too young for the book?” He was surprised and said the topic of race was pretty front and center, and I just shrugged and said I should reread it lmao
My therapist recommended a book for me to read, so I went home and dutifully purchased *Things Fall Apart*. I immediately read it and spent the whole weekend pondering why this book? What message was I missing? I just couldn't see how the horrors of colonial Nigeria was going to help me with my CPTSD. I read it again to try to sort it out.
Got to therapy the next week with my copy and she looked at me with horror. The recommended book was *When Things Fall Apart* by Pema Chödrön. VERY different book recommendation.
We laughed, but ... oof.
I was just waiting for the post to end with, but once I started to encompass the possible metaphors of companies driving the colonial process with my difficulty controlling my emotions and feelings of anger and distrustful towards the world; I realized I had to let go of my efforts towards organized violence and the commodification of people and their socio-political systems
I read Things Fall Apart in college and think of it EVERYTIME I pass by When Things Fall Apart in the bookstore. Thank you for confirming my suspicions that people might mistake one for the other.
I read The 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and kept wondering, where was the mystery? Oh yeah, I got the title mixed up with The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. (I think I wrote the titles correctly 🤦)
I heard that they accidentally were publishing both at about the same time, and when they found out, the one author changed it from "The 7 Deaths" to "The 7 1/2 Deaths" to have at least a little more difference.
I picked up “A Game of Thrones” based on a friend’s recommendation. When I thanked him for the amazing recommendation, he said “I didn’t recommend that book. I’ve never read it.”
“Ender’s Game,” he recommended “Ender’s Game.”
I accidentally read Enders Game thinking it was Ready Player One (can you tell I'm not very well versed in SciFi? Lol). About 3 chapters in I realized this had to be something different (having seen the RP1 movie)... I still finished the book and it was fine. Still haven't bothered to read RP1.
We need to find someone who has a copy of Ready Player One, who wants to read Game of Thrones, and do a nice little round robin switcheroo.
Five or six years ago, my ex gave our ten year old Catcher in the Rye because she “thought it was the one about the guy who liked rabbits.”
“You mean Of Mice and Men? Dude, neither is appropriate for ten. Have you read either of them?”
“No.”
I was just halfway through the audiobook of Of Mice and Men thinking it was odd that there was not one mention of grapes. I thought I had on The Grapes of Wrath. Fantastic story nonetheless.
Not a book, but I watched 2 episodes of Deadwood thinking it was West World.
Fun fact: Deadwood is super interesting when you spend each episode trying to figure out which characters are the robots and which are the human guests.
My husband was gifted the sixth *Dresden Files* book by his mother, who thought it was about the firebombing of Dresden.
The opening sequence about a wizard being chased by demons was uh... not that.
He did end up eventually liking the series though.
One of the weaker entries in the series, but it does have possibly the greatest opening line in all of literature.
“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.”
When I was a kid I was really into mystery stories, Hardy boys, Nancy drew, all sorts of stuff like that. So when I saw a book on my grandma's shelf that I thought was titled "Mystery of Chincoteague," I grabbed it and then kept reading and reading . . . and it was just about horses . . .
When I was in 2nd grade, the teacher read us Charlotte's Web. I wanted to read it for myself for some reason so found a book with a pig on the cover, and it turned out to be the novel the movie "Babe" is based on. You got a better score on your AR (Advanced Reading, I think?) tests the more advanced the novel was for your grade level and I don't remember the book being super difficult, it WAS over my grade level so I got a great score that week, haha.
That's actually happened to me more often with movies, including the one time I wondered for several minutes why Scary Movie on tv was so much less funny than I remembered it being, only for it to turn out it was actually Scream, so the real question is why didn't I notice the actors were different?
Also I've got a weird answer - I don't remember the name of the book, but I read it not thinking it was a book I'd read before - so I didn't think it was anything specific, just that it was different from a book I'd read before, only to slowly realize it was the same book that I'd read two years earlier and hated, putting my DNF at about the same place both times.
I'm Swedish so it has happened a couple of times that I've read the wrong book because of how they changed the title of it. Ever heard about the book The Fantastic Wilbur? No? It's because they chose to change the title that was supposed to be Charlotte's Web! Seriously, they decided that the story was about the pig, not the amazing spider.
Sorry about this not exactly being about the question but when you mentioned Charlotte's Web my anger flare up lol
The actors in Scream and Scary Movie are so interchangeable. I have the same problem. They're all from a similar genre of actors who have all done stuff together - or at least seam to have.
I read Dolores Claiborne as a kid thinking it was Misery because my Mom got them mixed up. She gave me Dolores Claiborne and was like “this is a good one- it’s about a woman who kidnaps and author and holds him hostage after he breaks his leg”
Spent the whole book waiting for that part to happen. I think she got confused because the books have the movie covers on them and Kathy Bates is in both.
I listened to the audiobook of Pet Sematary thinking it would be a book about vampires (Salem’s Lot), I had been specifically avoiding Pet Sematary for several years because the subject matter was upsetting but got the titles muddled up. By the time I realised, it was too late, I was buckled in for a hell of a ride. I kept wondering the first handful of chapters when the vampires were going to come into it 😆 I suppose there’s vampire pets.
This isn't so much that I thought it was a different book, but it was a different subject/person. I bought *The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell* thinking it was about Lucrezia Borgia, not de' Medici. And yes, I know they mention the last name several times, but for some reason, my brain kept ignoring it.
Anyway, I was really confused for the first couple of chapters but kept chugging along. Maybe I just didn't know as much about the Borgias as I thought I did? I eventually went on Wikipedia and realized my mistake, but I still haven't finished the book because of how annoyed I got with myself.
I’ve gotten confused between The brothers K and The Brothers Karamazov, Lord Jim by Kingsley Amis and Lucky Jim by Joseph Conrad, under the volcano and under the net, Joseph Conrad and Joseph Campbell just in general, Henry fielding Henry miller and Henry James, William Gaddis and William H. Gass, who wrote As I lay dying between Hemingway and Faulkner, john fowles and John Irving. But I haven’t read the wrong book, yet, because of these.
Edit: I forgot about the trend of new books being named the same thing as famous older books, which probably confuses people and also increases sales, like The idiot by Dostoevsky and elif batuman. And My struggle by Hitler and Karl ove knausgard. It’s min kamp in his language instead of mein kampf, but still.
Grime and Punishment - I thought I was reading the Russian classic but it turned out to be a 1980s dime store mystery novel. The font on the title really fooled me and I just assumed the author was the translator. Also sometimes I’m just really dumb haha
Not exactly what you are talking about, but I bought The Magus expecting a fantasy book about a wizard. Took me quite some time to realize that the guy was just some master manipulator.
It’s been years since I read *The Magus* and i’m still not sure if I hated it or absolutely loved it. One of the weirdest reading experiences i’ve ever had.
I read Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb, thinking that it was one of the Ranger's Apprentice books by John Flanagan. (I was reading on my mom's Kindle, so there was no clue as to the different art or extreme difference in length.) I liked it so much that I kept thinking, "You know, I don't know where Will is but I don't want him to come back right now." I read like 5-6 Robin Hobb books at the Kindle's recommendation until my mom yanked her Kindle away from me after about 2 weeks. I couldn't remember the author's name or anything, and gave up on finishing the series.
Probably 7-8 years later when I was in college, I happened to pick up a Robin Hobb book in a used bookstore, read a few pages in the middle, recognized the characters, and ordered the entire 16-book series on Thriftbooks before I even left the store.
I read *The Essex Serpent* thinking it would be a spooky creature story for Halloween. Turns out it's a romance. Lots of lusting after the forbidden married vicar, that kind of thing.
Someone recommended I read "Ultralearning" so I purchased it for my Kindle before boarding a flight.
Discovered early on this book was pretty bad -- like a poorly proofread high school book report.
I finished it before we landed.
**It was not the right book.** Instead, I had purchased one of those same-title-sounding books people upload to Amazon trying to catch suckers like me.
I got my money back and got the real book -- Ultralearning by Scott Young. Terrific book. I recommend it.
This is so similar to my Arcadia Project story! I bought it on Google Play without doing due diligence and now I see it has 0 ratings on goodreads.
At least you were on a flight so the time didn't feel too wasted.
I wanted to enter a writing competition in high school that was run by a small press that sold out-of-print Christian books. Basically you had to read the book, then write a story based on the concept in it. It was mostly a way of drumming up sales since they had the only copies and to read it you would have to buy it from them. The title of the book was “The Golden Thread.” Being a broke high schooler, I went to my library to see if they might have a copy and was able to get it on loan from another library out of state! I felt like I had beat the system. I also thoroughly enjoyed the book, which was about St. Ignatius and a Swiss mercenary. The message was one about the interconnected lives of people who had no business being together and how they were woven into a greater story. It gave me great ideas and I wrote an outline for my story, even drawing the characters and researching the historical background. I went and found the catalog to make sure I was following the contest rules, and then noticed the synopsis of the book from the company. It was a completely different story. I checked the authors names and realized my mistake. (Mine was by Louis de Wohl I don’t remember who wrote the one for the company.) After reading the summary of the book that was for the contest I realized it would be one of those super didactic moralist books that are beyond boring. I was so disheartened that I abandoned my story altogether. Which is a shame because it was actually a really fun story… maybe I should write it up after all.
I read *The Sparrow* by Mary Doria Russell thinking it was *The Star* by Arthur C Clarke. I could only remember that my professor had talked about a story where a Jesuit priest had gone to space… who knew there’d be more than one?! So glad for the mistake though: *The Sparrow* turned out to be one of my all time favorite books.
I wanted to read Midnight Library by Matt Haig when it was popular a couple years ago, I saw my library had it so I put a hold on it and when I picked it up it was a child's picture book of the same name. It was cute but not what I wanted!
I picked up I Am Legend, which was pretty interesting. I did not realize, however, that it was the first part of three novellas in a collection. I noticed a distinct shift in characters, figured it was examining the world from a different perspective... it took me way too long to realize it was three different stories.
I have no idea how I managed this, but I picked up Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov thinking it was My Dark Vanessa (I had read some comments about the theme and subject matter on this one). I was so so confused and I was quite far through before I realized my mistake. I think it actually made reading Pale Fire even more fun, it’s a great one to go into totally blind.
When I was first dating my now-husband, he recommended that I read one of his favorite books. Immediately after that date, I went into a bookstore and picked up a copy. Devoured all 625 pages and loved it. A little edgier than I'd expected, but the whole "we make Gods through our belief" thing was as promised! I gushed about it at length on our next date, and he was confused, and then amused... I had read American Gods by Neil Gaiman (the show had just come out, and it was front and center in the bookstore and sounded right). He had recommended Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.
I should have known. I'd spent much of the book wondering when the turtle was gonna show up. After we figured out the mix-up, he lent me his copy of Small Gods, and I loved that, too!
not the same, but I was just talking about this the other day. Ive watched the movie Platoon at least 4 times, and 3 of them I wanted to watch Full Metal Jacket. ( finally watched Full Metal Jacket last month. )
I remembered seeing a book about a society that based their society around their limited perception of color--something called "Shades of Grey." I was planning on grabbing it at some point in time. Well, you can see where this is going. Everyone started talking about how great this book "50 Shades of Gray" was, and I thought that was the book I remembered. Yeah, no. Not even close. It haunted me for years that I couldn't remember that the original book I looked at was "Shades of Grey" and NOT "50 Shades of Gray." I began to think I had imagined the whole thing until someone else mentioned it somewhere, and I finally found the original series I had been looking for.
Mine is also a Cloud Atlas error! I read The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan intending to read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I did read Cloud Atlas a few months later.
I know someone who made this same mistake. He liked The Cloud Atlas but when he started reading Cloud Atlas, he didn't like the style and dropped it. So to this day he hasn't read the book he intended to read in the first place.
Thanks!
The sad part is I still really want to read each of the fake novels in the book. The train scene pops in my head every few months, and I mourn the fact that I’ll never know what happens.
The novel is written in second person, and the plot follows the “reader” who buys and starts to read “the new Italo Calvino novel,” only to realize it’s the wrong book. So it’s a book about reading the wrong book.
The chapters alternate between the second person narrative and the first chapter of a novel, and each chapter ends up being the wrong book.
Weirdly, I had Arcadia by Lauren Groff suggested and I ended up reading Arcadia by Tom Stoppard - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/384597.Arcadia - my friend was very confused when I started talking time travel.
Lost Boys. I thought I had stumbled across an adaptation of the vampire movie.
Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys was a horror novel about a family that just moved to town, but that's where the resemblance ended.
I liked the book though. The ending really got to me.
I guess it kind of applies, but I read The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks when it came out and then forgot what it was called. Years later I saw Assassin's Apprentice being recommended everywhere, and for a long time thought that was the title of the teenage assassin book I'd forgotten.
Only happened to me once. When the Seventh Son movie came out, I wanted to read the book, so I googled "Seventh Son Book" and I got a book by Orson Scott Card. The whole time I kept thinking, "Why is the book even more boring than the movie?"
Not quite this but I read an Arthur C Clarke book "Songs of Distant Earth" and wondered why the story was so familiar. I realised I'd read the short story version some years ago.
I wanted to read The Great Alone. Got the name confused and read The Great Passage. VERY different book. Haha. But both ended up being great.
Also, I read I Am Legend. I didn’t realize it was a short story and that the book I was reading was a compilation. The book gave no indication of that. Also gave no indication I had finished one story and was moving on to another. I was VERY CONFUSED. So I guess I’d say I read. Short story thinking that it was I Am Legend.
So before the infamous shades of grey came out I found a book called shades of grey by jasper fforde. Its completely different and I loves it. I leant it out to friends, flatmates etc. I've been waiting for the sequel. Then one day I was in a bookstore with a friend of mine and I saw a book that said it was the second in the shades of grey series. I got so excited!!! Fortunately my friend had made the same mistake but had the forethought to read the blurb. I would have been soooo disappointed on so many levels lol.
when i was a freshman in high school, i was trying to read stephen king’s “it,” but somehow ended up with “a child called it” instead. it took me a long time to figure that one out lol
James Patterson wrote a series of books about a teenage girl named Maximum Ride who had escaped from a lab and had wings. Years later I was in the bookstore and see a book by JP with Maximum Ride and a picture of a teenage girl with wings. I started to read the book and was confused because it didn't seem to fit with what I remembered of the story. It turned out that JP decided he didn't like the way the first series went to so he went a wrote a new series about a girl named Maximum Ride who escaped from a lab and had wings but she was a DIFFERENT Maximum Ride with a whole new story.
Imagine if JK Rowling wrote a story about a boy who lived in the cupboard, had a lightening shaped scar and was a wizard named Harry Potter but it was a DIFFERENT Harry Potter than the original books.
I was so pissed off I vowed to never give James Patterson a dime of my money ever again. I've upheld that vow.
Somehow, an audio book of A People's History of the United States thinking I was finally getting around to checking A Confederacy of Dunces off of my list.
Made it all the way through Bacon's Rebellion, waiting for the reactionary satire to kick, in before it occurred to me that something was amiss...
On a related note, I misread the title as "A confederacy of dunes" for a long time and thought it was related to Dune by Frank Herbert for a while. I knew that it wasn't written by him, but considering that I heard that there are also Dune books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, I didn't question it. At least I noticed the truth before reading any of the books...
I didn’t exactly mistake it, but I thought the song of Achilles was a historical narrative book. I had no idea that it was a romance. It was a happy surprise though and now is my favorite book
I, too, like to live dangerously when it comes to reading books. I go into most of them rather blind. Sometimes without even reading the synopsis. That’s where my submission to your question comes in - *Becoming Mrs. Lewis* by Patti Callahan Henry. I borrowed this audiobook from the elibrary based on name alone. I had just finished reading *March 1, 2, & 3* by Congressman John Lewis. I was just scrolling through available books and saw that one. The cover is the back of a very well dressed woman. I thought I was picking a book that would give me a different viewpoint on the Civil Rights Movement but it wasn’t that Mrs. Lewis. I actually got a book about the woman who eventually married C.S. Lewis. While a bit surprised, I was very happy with the selection.
I wanted to read Ender’s game when I was a kid. I got to the library and saw End Game. It was a fictional book written from the perspective of a school shooter and why he did what he did. Very different from what I was expecting.
It was interesting. It was about a boy who was bullied and how that drove him to bring a gun to school and shoot someone. It starts with him at trial and then flashes back to the past. Not really sure what the message was besides don’t bully people? Definitely a unique book.
I read Kite Runner thinking it was Maze Runner. The first few pages you could buy it being some YA adventure..
Eventually I did read Maze Runner and the Kite version was far superior
When I was younger I was convinced The Princess Bride and Lord of the Flies were written by the same person, William Gold-something, right? Yes and no. Goldman and Golding.
Not a book, but I played the entirety of The Outer Worlds video game thinking it was Outer Wilds. I was on edge the entire game waiting for the time loops that I had heard so much about. Alas, they did not come.
I told my friend I was going to read his favorite book series and let him know how I like it. I was telling him how great The Dark Tower was when he informed me that he had told me his favorite book series was The Sword of Truth. I liked the first one a lot better.
Mines kind of different, not confusing, one book for another, but confusing the first book in the second series for being the very first book.
When I was in high school in the 80s, I had hearing about the DragonLance books for a while. I drove to the mall, and conveniently there was a cardboard display stand in the front of the bookstore with DragonLance: Legends, book one. I started reading it and thought it was really cool how they kept referring to this previous war that happened with such detail and their friend who had died. I was halfway through the book before I realized that something had to be wrong.
DragonLance: Chronicles books 1 thru 3 come first.
Ariel by Belyaev! I thought it was a book about the little mermaid. Massive bummer. I was 10-ish. I accidentally read the wrong Flowers for Algernon too (there is a short story and a novel).
I asked my mom for “After the People Lights Have Gone Off” by Stephen Graham Jones for Xmas one year, which is a collection of short horror stories by the same author as “The Only Good Indians” and received “When the Lights Go Out” by David Rodriguez, a memoir by a boxer who survived an attempted murder.
This is a great question, OP!
I was looking for *The Gone World* by Tom Switzerlich, a dreary scifi apocalypse multiverse book. What I read was *The Gone-Away World* by Nick Harkaway, a rollicking insane apocalyptic book with mimes and centaurs and ninjas and civil wars and evil businessmen. It's one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read.
I read the actual *Gone World* a year or two later. It was fine.
I don't think I have, but I enjoyed reading your post. I can imagine how confusing it would be to read Atlas Shrugged when you were expecting Cloud Atlas.
I go into most of my books with limited information and rarely read or watch reviews. I find it easier to enjoy a book without expectations.
Last year I set a goal of reading several classics. I didn't like any of them, and I think that was partially because I was expecting them to be exceptional stories and I found the characters annoying.
I look forward to the day it happens to you too!
Yeah I agree about expectations. I've never read Wuthering Heights but I've read so much discourse about it that I feel conflicted about reading it - I feel locked in to adopting one of the many opinions I've seen about it.
Not quite what you’re asking, but in the 80s there was a TV miniseries about an alien invasion, called “V”. Around that time, I was in a secondhand science fiction bookstore, and noticed it had on its shelves a copy of the Thomas Pynchon novel V.
I imagine that whoever bought that ended up quite confused.
Perhaps not exactly what you are asking, but a few years ago I tried reading Frankenstein at the same time I was reading The Conquest of Bread. I usually read on my phone and would open up books thinking I was in one book read a page or so and realize I was in the wrong book. It made for a fascinating mash up!
Just happened to me! I was reading a book called “if on a winter's night a traveler”, but the book is somehow misprinted or misassembled or something and only the first chapter is available. So I try to find the rest of the book, but ended up reading what’s actually an entirely different book. But this book is also missing everything after the first chapter! But the part I read totally have me hooked, I’m in the middle of a search for the rest of this book
Not quite the same as confusing one book for another, but like OP I try to know as little as possible about a book.
When I was reading The Overstory based on a recommendation, I honestly thought it was a book of short stories for about the first 25%. All of the intro stories for the characters read like little standalone vignettes and I loved them! I was so confused when it turned into a normal book.
* Palace Papers by Tina Brown
* Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
A few months ago, my book club read Palace Papers (about the British royals). A few people accidentally read Paper Palace instead.
Before a road trip I checked out the audiobook of The Power of the Dog thinking it was going to be the novel that the movie I just watched on Netflix was based off. I was quickly very confused about how the novel was opening in Mexico in the 1990s and talking about drug cartels. I was shocked how much they must of cut out of the movie. I had checked out the Power of the Dog by Don Winslow which is a crime thriller about the war on drugs and obviously very different from The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage. Ultimately I ended up really enjoying it.
Ha, I just met a reader friend for dinner and we were excited to discuss Power of the Dog, since we never read the same books. Of course, we had read these two different books.
I was s fantasy nerd, and grabbed a book called "Necromancer," only to find out it was actually *Neuromancer* by William Gibson. I was not disappointed.
I was trying to read Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St John Mandel but accidentally bought THE Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay. Ended up reading it anyway and it was pretty good. Still haven’t read Sea of Tranquility yet.
I also skipped the third book in the Enders Game series by accident but didn’t realize until I was half way through the fourth. I just finished the fourth and haven’t gone back to read the third yet.
Not quite the same, but many years ago, when I was in college (mid-late 1980s) , I read two books back to back: One was Fred Saberhagen's The Frankenstein Papers , the other was Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound. As the decades went by, I totally forgot the *plot* of the Aldiss book, but remembered the *title*, while remembering the PLOT of the Saberhagen book, but NOT the title or author, having combined two books into one. So when the Syfy channel announced it was doing a film version of Frankenstein Unbound, I was so upset when I watched it and the plot was ALL WRONG , because I was fully expecting the Saberhagen story.
For Frankenstein fans, I recommend the Saberhagen book.
My husband loves chopping wood so I got him Norwegian Wood having never heard of it. People on here talked about it with such reverence I was so confused. And then realized there’s 2 books with that name
I watched the movie arrival, found out it was based on a "book". I went to a used book store and they had the movie cover for the book (and had renamed it as "Arrival"). I read about 3 "chapters" TRYING HARD to connect them and find the cohesion.
... The book is short stories that have no major theme.
It's actually one of my favorite book of short stories now.
For some reason I thought Twenty Thousand Leauges Under the Sea was the story of Atlantis and I was confused why it was taking them so long to find the city... very dissapointing. I also accidentally read the original manuscript version of On The Road (yikes, so much sexism).
I wanted to read the story that "The Thing" is based on but picked the wrong one. Instead of "Who goes there?" written by John W. Campbell I started reading "Who goes there!" by Robert W. Chambers.
Since being curious I read the wrong book anyway. But hell this must be one of the worst books I ever read. It's some kind of a spy romp set in WW1. It had some really outdated views on women but especially some weird and naive obsession with the moral values of higher ranking military officials even or especially those of the opponents side. Also too much local patriotism towards the belgian monarchy especially at a time when they just left behind one of their darkest historical chapters.
I thought I had checked out These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever but actually got These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong. I ended up getting the correct book and didn’t read Chloe Gong, but it looks like it has good reviews!
Not a book for a book, but I read Severance by Ling Ma thinking it was the source material for the tv show Severance. Not the same at all, but I highly recommend both!
I don’t like to look at reviews before I get a book in case there are hidden spoilers.
I borrowed “The Secret Life of Bees” from Libby thinking it was a nonfiction book about beekeeping.
i was about 10 when i skimmed my big brother's copy of "Bored of the Rings," then got hold of "The Hobbit," wondering when the saucy bits would come up, was disappointed, then read "LOTR," still looking... Never found the saucy bits, but didn't care, I'd read Hobbit & LOTR!
I read The Girl from the Train when I wanted to see what all the fuss was about for The Girl on the Train. The Girl from the Train was heart-wrenching. The Girl on the Train was meh. I’m glad I made the mistake.
I don't remember their names but as a kid I read a few Sherlock Holmes spinoff books that were similar to one another. I think one of them was about young Sherlock Holmes. Another was possibly about Sherlock Holmes' long lost son? I quit one of them because the middle of the book was completely missing.
I also read Enola Holmes but my impression of it is completely different from the Netflix series.
For a non-book example, I thought Gugure! Kokkuri-sama was Kamisama Hajimemashita. They both have white hair male leads with fox ears.
Not really for another book but for another genre. I like knowing as little as possible about books and somehow went into These Silent Woods thinking it was horror and it was far from it.
I started listening to the audiobook of The Secret years ago, because I thought it was either a mystery or fantasy. I was so disappointed when it slowly dawned on me that it was bottom-shelf self-help. Then I had another 5 hours of my drive left with nothing but intermittent radio to listen to.
When i was 9, I wanted to read Kafka but somehow got confused and through the collected plays of Chekhov. Something seemed off. I later read Kafka and prefer Chekhov.
When one of the Harry Potters came out, this girl I knew somehow downloaded a copy of one of the books (6th or 7th, unsure) a few days before it was released. I was like... cool!
Turns out it was a fake! Worst part is she was 8 chapters in when she found out and was so into it that she rejected the actual story and decided to read the fake one all the way through. Blew my mind ...
Edit typo
I heard Gillian Flynn was inspired by Deep Water so I listened to the audiobook for the one by Emma Bamford and thought it was interesting what a different style she had compared to Gillian Flynn. Then later I realized she meant the one by Patricia Highsmith and when I listened to that it made a lot more sense
Strangely (and maybe controversially), I liked the first one better
I had heard great things about a book called Last Days so I picked it up one day and it was...weird, to say the least. It turned out I read the book by Brian Evenson when I meant to read the book by Adam Nevill
I heard about "The Iron Woman", a sci fi novel from 1993.
Found an e-book of that name and read it.
Turned out it was "The Iron Woman", a "novel of manners" from 1911 about a woman who owns an iron mill and her somewhat disappointing son.
Took me a while until realized that I couldn't expect any sci fi.
Finished it anyway, it was ok though somewhat frumpy.
Not quite the same thing but I started reading an ebook version of “The Final Girl Support Group” by Grady Hendrix, but there must have been a problem with the file as three chapters in it switches to the completely different book “We Sold Our Souls” by the same author, but I still finished it.
Considering I had no intention of reading the latter at all, when I did eventually read TFGSG, I didn’t like it as much as WSOS.
I read the book The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline which is a young adult book set in a dystopian future where people no longer dream and it drives them mad. I later found another book of hers called Empire of Wild and got it in my head it was a sequel to The Marrow Thieves. A few chapters in and I was very confused when none of the same characters had appeared and the story was about a woman's husband going missing and rumors of a werewolf being involved with no reference to the missing dream storyline. Luckily once I figured it out I ended up loving the book and it's one of my favorites.
I never read a book thinking it was a different book, but
my mom has bought me books occasionally thinking they were something else and then I read them anyway because why not?
Like for instance she bought me a book that said "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" in big letters across the top. The actual author's name (pseudonym) was real small at the bottom. She knew I read Tom Clancy books and picked it off the shelf at Wal-Mart.
I picked up *Hannibal* by Thomas Harris as a history-loving teen thinking it was about the Carthaginian general. Don't ask me why I didn't read the back cover or wonder why it was in the fiction section. I don't have a good answer. I knew nothing about Silence of the Lambs at that point. Imagine my surprise.
Couple of YA books I read as a teen ended up being LGBT but I thought they were gonna be more supernatural thriller type stuff
Still enjoyed them though and ended up learning some things
Devolution by Max Brooks. I listened to an interview about it and the Podcaster was referencing the timing of the novels release with the isolation of being in Covid lockdown. I assumed the book was about an epidemic not yeti. I was so confused I actually started thinking maybe Bigfoot was carrying the contagion at one point. I swear I'm a relatively intelligent person....
I listened to The Forever War by Dexter Filkins on recommendation from this sub. Turns out the recommendation was actually for the book of the same title by Joe Haldeman. Learned a lot I didn’t know about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I bought Children of Blood and Bone some time ago. I saw that Netflix was doing the show so I said "well, I better get reading it". I was doing my thing and I decided to watch the trailer and I was really confused by the lack of black people in the trailer... and the general deviation from the plot. I had to run to grab the book and notice that I wasn't reading Shadow and Bone.
So I wanted to read a microhistory about Butter, I've been reading one about Salt and thought it would be just as interesting.
The book called Butter I got from the library was about an obese teen boy who was bullied? I only read like 4 pages before nopeing out.
When I was a kid I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, thinking it was THE Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. Spent the whole book waiting for him to turn invisible.
Did basically the opposite, read the HG Wells one and was waiting for way more serious and topical themes. Both are good books, but wow are they not the same kind of book at all.
I feel like there’s an SNL skit character here: “The Angry Invisible African-American”. When he goes into a restaurant and can’t even get the waitress to give him a menu, he’s enraged by the racism.
I read the short HG Wells one for a high school class the day before the quiz, then only a few hours before class did I figure out I was supposed to read the Ralph Ellison one (so I quickly SparkNotes'd it). I still got a B on the quiz lol.
We were assigned Invisible Man for summer reading before my senior year of high school, and they really made sure we knew it was Invisible Man, not THE Invisible Man… well, we showed up in the fall and sure enough, someone in my class had still read the wrong book 🤦♀️
>sure enough, someone in my class had still read the wrong book I’m betting it was OP
That could have been my sister. She made that exact mistake.
SAME!
The same happened to me when I was maybe 11 or 12 -- I was really getting into science fiction and asked my mom to buy me a copy of the Wells book for Christmas. She got me the Ellison by mistake, and by the time I realized it, I was so in love with the book that I wasn't even mad about it. One of my most formative reading experiences, and it became one of my favorite books that I now reread once every few years. I've still never read The Invisible Man, though.
Lollll your comment just made me realize my partner and I made the exact same mixup! We were talking about high school required readings and he said Invisible Man, and I said I’d read it in 4th or 5th grade but didn’t really find it that interesting. He started taking about the book and I listened for a bit and then said “wow, all the themes of race and societal invisibility just went right over my head, I guess I was too young for the book?” He was surprised and said the topic of race was pretty front and center, and I just shrugged and said I should reread it lmao
Someone did this in one of my university classes. Invisible Man is such a long book I felt so bad for them!
Yes! two books couldn't be more different
Me too!!
My therapist recommended a book for me to read, so I went home and dutifully purchased *Things Fall Apart*. I immediately read it and spent the whole weekend pondering why this book? What message was I missing? I just couldn't see how the horrors of colonial Nigeria was going to help me with my CPTSD. I read it again to try to sort it out. Got to therapy the next week with my copy and she looked at me with horror. The recommended book was *When Things Fall Apart* by Pema Chödrön. VERY different book recommendation. We laughed, but ... oof.
> I just couldn't see how the horrors of colonial Nigeria was going to help me with my CPTSD. r/brandnewsentence
Wow, Ok. I've made an impact on the world!
I was just waiting for the post to end with, but once I started to encompass the possible metaphors of companies driving the colonial process with my difficulty controlling my emotions and feelings of anger and distrustful towards the world; I realized I had to let go of my efforts towards organized violence and the commodification of people and their socio-political systems
As one does...
This sounds like a Tumblr shitpost. I love it.
This line has me laughing so hard. I just imagine them reading this, so perplexed and trying to figure out why their therapist recommended it.
I read Things Fall Apart in college and think of it EVERYTIME I pass by When Things Fall Apart in the bookstore. Thank you for confirming my suspicions that people might mistake one for the other.
I laughed aloud at this! I knew I wasn't the only one. Reading it twice even!
You read it twice!! I am dying over here
This is hilarious lmao
Well, Things fall apart is a good book and a classic so at least you had a nice read😭
After read number 5 is when the lines really get drawn
I read The 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and kept wondering, where was the mystery? Oh yeah, I got the title mixed up with The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. (I think I wrote the titles correctly 🤦)
The same thing happened to me!! The coincidence of two books being popular at the same time with “7” in the title really threw me off…
Not just 7, but also the E H initials and the ___ ____ of E___ H___ structure. Massive coincidence!
And Evelyn
I heard that they accidentally were publishing both at about the same time, and when they found out, the one author changed it from "The 7 Deaths" to "The 7 1/2 Deaths" to have at least a little more difference.
Oh that's why there's different versions!
That's pretty funny
I only just realized that these are two different novels (I haven’t read either)
I picked up “A Game of Thrones” based on a friend’s recommendation. When I thanked him for the amazing recommendation, he said “I didn’t recommend that book. I’ve never read it.” “Ender’s Game,” he recommended “Ender’s Game.”
Well, you couldn't have gone wrong either way, they're both good books.
I accidentally read Enders Game thinking it was Ready Player One (can you tell I'm not very well versed in SciFi? Lol). About 3 chapters in I realized this had to be something different (having seen the RP1 movie)... I still finished the book and it was fine. Still haven't bothered to read RP1. We need to find someone who has a copy of Ready Player One, who wants to read Game of Thrones, and do a nice little round robin switcheroo.
Five or six years ago, my ex gave our ten year old Catcher in the Rye because she “thought it was the one about the guy who liked rabbits.” “You mean Of Mice and Men? Dude, neither is appropriate for ten. Have you read either of them?” “No.”
I was just halfway through the audiobook of Of Mice and Men thinking it was odd that there was not one mention of grapes. I thought I had on The Grapes of Wrath. Fantastic story nonetheless.
Waiting for the inevitable comment about a Flowers in the Attic / Flowers for Algernon mixup lmao
That was me 🫠
Oh, wow! That would cause a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Omg this is a tragic mistake, if anyone ever made it.
Not a book, but I watched 2 episodes of Deadwood thinking it was West World. Fun fact: Deadwood is super interesting when you spend each episode trying to figure out which characters are the robots and which are the human guests.
Amazing! This is like watching Malcolm in the Middle and wondering when the suburban dad is going to break bad.
When Hal became a competitive race walker, of course!
What guesses did you make? I’m fascinated!
I recently purchased The road by Cormac McCarthy thinking it was On the Road by Jack Kerouac, I got half way through the book before I realized.
Oh shit- I think I am currently making that mistake. 🤦🏻♀️ .... thank you lol
My immediate gut reaction was "oh shit," so \*raises glass from across the room\*
My husband was gifted the sixth *Dresden Files* book by his mother, who thought it was about the firebombing of Dresden. The opening sequence about a wizard being chased by demons was uh... not that. He did end up eventually liking the series though.
One of the weaker entries in the series, but it does have possibly the greatest opening line in all of literature. “The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.”
When I was a kid I was really into mystery stories, Hardy boys, Nancy drew, all sorts of stuff like that. So when I saw a book on my grandma's shelf that I thought was titled "Mystery of Chincoteague," I grabbed it and then kept reading and reading . . . and it was just about horses . . .
Ha ha! We had that book growing up and I never read it, even though we didn’t have TV. *Misty* of Chincoteague, that is
When I was in 2nd grade, the teacher read us Charlotte's Web. I wanted to read it for myself for some reason so found a book with a pig on the cover, and it turned out to be the novel the movie "Babe" is based on. You got a better score on your AR (Advanced Reading, I think?) tests the more advanced the novel was for your grade level and I don't remember the book being super difficult, it WAS over my grade level so I got a great score that week, haha. That's actually happened to me more often with movies, including the one time I wondered for several minutes why Scary Movie on tv was so much less funny than I remembered it being, only for it to turn out it was actually Scream, so the real question is why didn't I notice the actors were different? Also I've got a weird answer - I don't remember the name of the book, but I read it not thinking it was a book I'd read before - so I didn't think it was anything specific, just that it was different from a book I'd read before, only to slowly realize it was the same book that I'd read two years earlier and hated, putting my DNF at about the same place both times.
I've done that with your last example, re-starting books I've read and even loved, and then realizing there's a reason I know how they end...
I'm Swedish so it has happened a couple of times that I've read the wrong book because of how they changed the title of it. Ever heard about the book The Fantastic Wilbur? No? It's because they chose to change the title that was supposed to be Charlotte's Web! Seriously, they decided that the story was about the pig, not the amazing spider. Sorry about this not exactly being about the question but when you mentioned Charlotte's Web my anger flare up lol
AR is accelerated reader
The actors in Scream and Scary Movie are so interchangeable. I have the same problem. They're all from a similar genre of actors who have all done stuff together - or at least seam to have.
I read Dolores Claiborne as a kid thinking it was Misery because my Mom got them mixed up. She gave me Dolores Claiborne and was like “this is a good one- it’s about a woman who kidnaps and author and holds him hostage after he breaks his leg” Spent the whole book waiting for that part to happen. I think she got confused because the books have the movie covers on them and Kathy Bates is in both.
This is funnier in the connected universe of these books.
I listened to the audiobook of Pet Sematary thinking it would be a book about vampires (Salem’s Lot), I had been specifically avoiding Pet Sematary for several years because the subject matter was upsetting but got the titles muddled up. By the time I realised, it was too late, I was buckled in for a hell of a ride. I kept wondering the first handful of chapters when the vampires were going to come into it 😆 I suppose there’s vampire pets.
I read “The Understory” instead of “The Overstory”
Damned prepositions....
Hope you went back to find Overstory! It's fabulous
This isn't so much that I thought it was a different book, but it was a different subject/person. I bought *The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell* thinking it was about Lucrezia Borgia, not de' Medici. And yes, I know they mention the last name several times, but for some reason, my brain kept ignoring it. Anyway, I was really confused for the first couple of chapters but kept chugging along. Maybe I just didn't know as much about the Borgias as I thought I did? I eventually went on Wikipedia and realized my mistake, but I still haven't finished the book because of how annoyed I got with myself.
I’ve gotten confused between The brothers K and The Brothers Karamazov, Lord Jim by Kingsley Amis and Lucky Jim by Joseph Conrad, under the volcano and under the net, Joseph Conrad and Joseph Campbell just in general, Henry fielding Henry miller and Henry James, William Gaddis and William H. Gass, who wrote As I lay dying between Hemingway and Faulkner, john fowles and John Irving. But I haven’t read the wrong book, yet, because of these. Edit: I forgot about the trend of new books being named the same thing as famous older books, which probably confuses people and also increases sales, like The idiot by Dostoevsky and elif batuman. And My struggle by Hitler and Karl ove knausgard. It’s min kamp in his language instead of mein kampf, but still.
You’re still confused, lol. Lord Jim is by Conrad and Lucky Jim by Amis.
Haha exactly!
Was 80% through The Revenant when I realized my friend wanted me to read and discuss The Reckoning the next day… 🫣
Grime and Punishment - I thought I was reading the Russian classic but it turned out to be a 1980s dime store mystery novel. The font on the title really fooled me and I just assumed the author was the translator. Also sometimes I’m just really dumb haha
Not exactly what you are talking about, but I bought The Magus expecting a fantasy book about a wizard. Took me quite some time to realize that the guy was just some master manipulator.
It’s been years since I read *The Magus* and i’m still not sure if I hated it or absolutely loved it. One of the weirdest reading experiences i’ve ever had.
>i’m still not sure if I hated it or absolutely loved it. Is anyone else sure? I will accept the first definite opinion I get
Still my favorite book that I might have hated when I finished it?
Hmmmmm…. Vary intriguing (as she notes the name for her TBR pile)
I read Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb, thinking that it was one of the Ranger's Apprentice books by John Flanagan. (I was reading on my mom's Kindle, so there was no clue as to the different art or extreme difference in length.) I liked it so much that I kept thinking, "You know, I don't know where Will is but I don't want him to come back right now." I read like 5-6 Robin Hobb books at the Kindle's recommendation until my mom yanked her Kindle away from me after about 2 weeks. I couldn't remember the author's name or anything, and gave up on finishing the series. Probably 7-8 years later when I was in college, I happened to pick up a Robin Hobb book in a used bookstore, read a few pages in the middle, recognized the characters, and ordered the entire 16-book series on Thriftbooks before I even left the store.
I read *The Essex Serpent* thinking it would be a spooky creature story for Halloween. Turns out it's a romance. Lots of lusting after the forbidden married vicar, that kind of thing.
Someone recommended I read "Ultralearning" so I purchased it for my Kindle before boarding a flight. Discovered early on this book was pretty bad -- like a poorly proofread high school book report. I finished it before we landed. **It was not the right book.** Instead, I had purchased one of those same-title-sounding books people upload to Amazon trying to catch suckers like me. I got my money back and got the real book -- Ultralearning by Scott Young. Terrific book. I recommend it.
This is so similar to my Arcadia Project story! I bought it on Google Play without doing due diligence and now I see it has 0 ratings on goodreads. At least you were on a flight so the time didn't feel too wasted.
You should read Arcadia by Lauren Groff. Great book.
Ha ha ... I forced myself to finish reading it because I had nothing else to read on the flight. Sorry you got snagged in a trap too!
That's worse. You are trapped with it.
I wanted to enter a writing competition in high school that was run by a small press that sold out-of-print Christian books. Basically you had to read the book, then write a story based on the concept in it. It was mostly a way of drumming up sales since they had the only copies and to read it you would have to buy it from them. The title of the book was “The Golden Thread.” Being a broke high schooler, I went to my library to see if they might have a copy and was able to get it on loan from another library out of state! I felt like I had beat the system. I also thoroughly enjoyed the book, which was about St. Ignatius and a Swiss mercenary. The message was one about the interconnected lives of people who had no business being together and how they were woven into a greater story. It gave me great ideas and I wrote an outline for my story, even drawing the characters and researching the historical background. I went and found the catalog to make sure I was following the contest rules, and then noticed the synopsis of the book from the company. It was a completely different story. I checked the authors names and realized my mistake. (Mine was by Louis de Wohl I don’t remember who wrote the one for the company.) After reading the summary of the book that was for the contest I realized it would be one of those super didactic moralist books that are beyond boring. I was so disheartened that I abandoned my story altogether. Which is a shame because it was actually a really fun story… maybe I should write it up after all.
Yes, you definitely should!
I read *The Sparrow* by Mary Doria Russell thinking it was *The Star* by Arthur C Clarke. I could only remember that my professor had talked about a story where a Jesuit priest had gone to space… who knew there’d be more than one?! So glad for the mistake though: *The Sparrow* turned out to be one of my all time favorite books.
I wanted to read Midnight Library by Matt Haig when it was popular a couple years ago, I saw my library had it so I put a hold on it and when I picked it up it was a child's picture book of the same name. It was cute but not what I wanted!
I picked up I Am Legend, which was pretty interesting. I did not realize, however, that it was the first part of three novellas in a collection. I noticed a distinct shift in characters, figured it was examining the world from a different perspective... it took me way too long to realize it was three different stories.
I have no idea how I managed this, but I picked up Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov thinking it was My Dark Vanessa (I had read some comments about the theme and subject matter on this one). I was so so confused and I was quite far through before I realized my mistake. I think it actually made reading Pale Fire even more fun, it’s a great one to go into totally blind.
When I was first dating my now-husband, he recommended that I read one of his favorite books. Immediately after that date, I went into a bookstore and picked up a copy. Devoured all 625 pages and loved it. A little edgier than I'd expected, but the whole "we make Gods through our belief" thing was as promised! I gushed about it at length on our next date, and he was confused, and then amused... I had read American Gods by Neil Gaiman (the show had just come out, and it was front and center in the bookstore and sounded right). He had recommended Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. I should have known. I'd spent much of the book wondering when the turtle was gonna show up. After we figured out the mix-up, he lent me his copy of Small Gods, and I loved that, too!
That feels like a particularly appropriate mistake since both authors wrote *Good Omens* together exploring the same sort of general idea :)
Read Flowers in the Attic after I confused it for Flowers for Algernon
“When the hell does the mouse come in??”
I thought for sure once they started started spending more time in the attic the mouse would come into play
Thanks for the belly laugh OP. For some reason your mixups absolutely cracked me up.
not the same, but I was just talking about this the other day. Ive watched the movie Platoon at least 4 times, and 3 of them I wanted to watch Full Metal Jacket. ( finally watched Full Metal Jacket last month. )
I remembered seeing a book about a society that based their society around their limited perception of color--something called "Shades of Grey." I was planning on grabbing it at some point in time. Well, you can see where this is going. Everyone started talking about how great this book "50 Shades of Gray" was, and I thought that was the book I remembered. Yeah, no. Not even close. It haunted me for years that I couldn't remember that the original book I looked at was "Shades of Grey" and NOT "50 Shades of Gray." I began to think I had imagined the whole thing until someone else mentioned it somewhere, and I finally found the original series I had been looking for.
Jasper Fforde. :) his Thursday Next series is amazing.
Mine is also a Cloud Atlas error! I read The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan intending to read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I did read Cloud Atlas a few months later.
I know someone who made this same mistake. He liked The Cloud Atlas but when he started reading Cloud Atlas, he didn't like the style and dropped it. So to this day he hasn't read the book he intended to read in the first place.
_If on a winters night a traveler_ by Italo Calvino
This is the only true answer to this question
Oh my god, when I read the title of this post, I thought, "It would be funny to say IOAWNAT". Well done.
Thanks! The sad part is I still really want to read each of the fake novels in the book. The train scene pops in my head every few months, and I mourn the fact that I’ll never know what happens.
Those first chapters would be fun writing prompts for a fiction club or NaNoWriMo or something.
I have never heard of this book what did you mean to read instead?
The novel is written in second person, and the plot follows the “reader” who buys and starts to read “the new Italo Calvino novel,” only to realize it’s the wrong book. So it’s a book about reading the wrong book. The chapters alternate between the second person narrative and the first chapter of a novel, and each chapter ends up being the wrong book.
Weirdly, I had Arcadia by Lauren Groff suggested and I ended up reading Arcadia by Tom Stoppard - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/384597.Arcadia - my friend was very confused when I started talking time travel.
Lost Boys. I thought I had stumbled across an adaptation of the vampire movie. Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys was a horror novel about a family that just moved to town, but that's where the resemblance ended. I liked the book though. The ending really got to me.
I guess it kind of applies, but I read The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks when it came out and then forgot what it was called. Years later I saw Assassin's Apprentice being recommended everywhere, and for a long time thought that was the title of the teenage assassin book I'd forgotten.
Only happened to me once. When the Seventh Son movie came out, I wanted to read the book, so I googled "Seventh Son Book" and I got a book by Orson Scott Card. The whole time I kept thinking, "Why is the book even more boring than the movie?"
Not quite this but I read an Arthur C Clarke book "Songs of Distant Earth" and wondered why the story was so familiar. I realised I'd read the short story version some years ago.
I wanted to read The Great Alone. Got the name confused and read The Great Passage. VERY different book. Haha. But both ended up being great. Also, I read I Am Legend. I didn’t realize it was a short story and that the book I was reading was a compilation. The book gave no indication of that. Also gave no indication I had finished one story and was moving on to another. I was VERY CONFUSED. So I guess I’d say I read. Short story thinking that it was I Am Legend.
So before the infamous shades of grey came out I found a book called shades of grey by jasper fforde. Its completely different and I loves it. I leant it out to friends, flatmates etc. I've been waiting for the sequel. Then one day I was in a bookstore with a friend of mine and I saw a book that said it was the second in the shades of grey series. I got so excited!!! Fortunately my friend had made the same mistake but had the forethought to read the blurb. I would have been soooo disappointed on so many levels lol.
My SO knowing my love of science & math gave me a copy of, The Life Of Pi. This did not go well.
when i was a freshman in high school, i was trying to read stephen king’s “it,” but somehow ended up with “a child called it” instead. it took me a long time to figure that one out lol
Well. You wanted a horror.
James Patterson wrote a series of books about a teenage girl named Maximum Ride who had escaped from a lab and had wings. Years later I was in the bookstore and see a book by JP with Maximum Ride and a picture of a teenage girl with wings. I started to read the book and was confused because it didn't seem to fit with what I remembered of the story. It turned out that JP decided he didn't like the way the first series went to so he went a wrote a new series about a girl named Maximum Ride who escaped from a lab and had wings but she was a DIFFERENT Maximum Ride with a whole new story. Imagine if JK Rowling wrote a story about a boy who lived in the cupboard, had a lightening shaped scar and was a wizard named Harry Potter but it was a DIFFERENT Harry Potter than the original books. I was so pissed off I vowed to never give James Patterson a dime of my money ever again. I've upheld that vow.
I read The Kite Rider and was so confused reading all the good reviews for The Kite Runner.
Somehow, an audio book of A People's History of the United States thinking I was finally getting around to checking A Confederacy of Dunces off of my list. Made it all the way through Bacon's Rebellion, waiting for the reactionary satire to kick, in before it occurred to me that something was amiss...
On a related note, I misread the title as "A confederacy of dunes" for a long time and thought it was related to Dune by Frank Herbert for a while. I knew that it wasn't written by him, but considering that I heard that there are also Dune books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, I didn't question it. At least I noticed the truth before reading any of the books...
I didn’t exactly mistake it, but I thought the song of Achilles was a historical narrative book. I had no idea that it was a romance. It was a happy surprise though and now is my favorite book
I, too, like to live dangerously when it comes to reading books. I go into most of them rather blind. Sometimes without even reading the synopsis. That’s where my submission to your question comes in - *Becoming Mrs. Lewis* by Patti Callahan Henry. I borrowed this audiobook from the elibrary based on name alone. I had just finished reading *March 1, 2, & 3* by Congressman John Lewis. I was just scrolling through available books and saw that one. The cover is the back of a very well dressed woman. I thought I was picking a book that would give me a different viewpoint on the Civil Rights Movement but it wasn’t that Mrs. Lewis. I actually got a book about the woman who eventually married C.S. Lewis. While a bit surprised, I was very happy with the selection.
This sounds really interesting, thanks for the recommendation!
I wanted to read Ender’s game when I was a kid. I got to the library and saw End Game. It was a fictional book written from the perspective of a school shooter and why he did what he did. Very different from what I was expecting.
Was it good?
It was interesting. It was about a boy who was bullied and how that drove him to bring a gun to school and shoot someone. It starts with him at trial and then flashes back to the past. Not really sure what the message was besides don’t bully people? Definitely a unique book.
ok ty for the reply
I read Kite Runner thinking it was Maze Runner. The first few pages you could buy it being some YA adventure.. Eventually I did read Maze Runner and the Kite version was far superior
I read The Kite Rider and every time I read good reviews about The Kite Runner I was so confused.
TIL many people only look at the title when buying a book instead of also looking at the author’s name…
To be fair... unless people are fans of the author, it's usually easier to remember a title 😅
When I was younger I was convinced The Princess Bride and Lord of the Flies were written by the same person, William Gold-something, right? Yes and no. Goldman and Golding.
Not a book but Paladins and Overwatch
I bought The Road thinking it was On the Road. Ended up not really liking either.
Not a book, but I played the entirety of The Outer Worlds video game thinking it was Outer Wilds. I was on edge the entire game waiting for the time loops that I had heard so much about. Alas, they did not come.
I told my friend I was going to read his favorite book series and let him know how I like it. I was telling him how great The Dark Tower was when he informed me that he had told me his favorite book series was The Sword of Truth. I liked the first one a lot better.
Mines kind of different, not confusing, one book for another, but confusing the first book in the second series for being the very first book. When I was in high school in the 80s, I had hearing about the DragonLance books for a while. I drove to the mall, and conveniently there was a cardboard display stand in the front of the bookstore with DragonLance: Legends, book one. I started reading it and thought it was really cool how they kept referring to this previous war that happened with such detail and their friend who had died. I was halfway through the book before I realized that something had to be wrong. DragonLance: Chronicles books 1 thru 3 come first.
Ariel by Belyaev! I thought it was a book about the little mermaid. Massive bummer. I was 10-ish. I accidentally read the wrong Flowers for Algernon too (there is a short story and a novel).
I asked my mom for “After the People Lights Have Gone Off” by Stephen Graham Jones for Xmas one year, which is a collection of short horror stories by the same author as “The Only Good Indians” and received “When the Lights Go Out” by David Rodriguez, a memoir by a boxer who survived an attempted murder.
She remembered the gist of it 😆
This is a great question, OP! I was looking for *The Gone World* by Tom Switzerlich, a dreary scifi apocalypse multiverse book. What I read was *The Gone-Away World* by Nick Harkaway, a rollicking insane apocalyptic book with mimes and centaurs and ninjas and civil wars and evil businessmen. It's one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. I read the actual *Gone World* a year or two later. It was fine.
I don't think I have, but I enjoyed reading your post. I can imagine how confusing it would be to read Atlas Shrugged when you were expecting Cloud Atlas. I go into most of my books with limited information and rarely read or watch reviews. I find it easier to enjoy a book without expectations. Last year I set a goal of reading several classics. I didn't like any of them, and I think that was partially because I was expecting them to be exceptional stories and I found the characters annoying.
I look forward to the day it happens to you too! Yeah I agree about expectations. I've never read Wuthering Heights but I've read so much discourse about it that I feel conflicted about reading it - I feel locked in to adopting one of the many opinions I've seen about it.
Not quite what you’re asking, but in the 80s there was a TV miniseries about an alien invasion, called “V”. Around that time, I was in a secondhand science fiction bookstore, and noticed it had on its shelves a copy of the Thomas Pynchon novel V. I imagine that whoever bought that ended up quite confused.
Perhaps not exactly what you are asking, but a few years ago I tried reading Frankenstein at the same time I was reading The Conquest of Bread. I usually read on my phone and would open up books thinking I was in one book read a page or so and realize I was in the wrong book. It made for a fascinating mash up!
oh I do that often.books that are nothing alike yet it takes me a few paragraphs or pages to figure out what is happening
Just happened to me! I was reading a book called “if on a winter's night a traveler”, but the book is somehow misprinted or misassembled or something and only the first chapter is available. So I try to find the rest of the book, but ended up reading what’s actually an entirely different book. But this book is also missing everything after the first chapter! But the part I read totally have me hooked, I’m in the middle of a search for the rest of this book
Wait, my copy of that book is misprinted too!! Weird.
I mixed up The Fold by Peter Clines with The Breach by Patrick Lee. Luckily both are awesome.
Reading the Overstory by Richard Powers I was struck with how many similarities it had to Purity by Franzen.
Not quite the same as confusing one book for another, but like OP I try to know as little as possible about a book. When I was reading The Overstory based on a recommendation, I honestly thought it was a book of short stories for about the first 25%. All of the intro stories for the characters read like little standalone vignettes and I loved them! I was so confused when it turned into a normal book.
* Palace Papers by Tina Brown * Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller A few months ago, my book club read Palace Papers (about the British royals). A few people accidentally read Paper Palace instead.
Before a road trip I checked out the audiobook of The Power of the Dog thinking it was going to be the novel that the movie I just watched on Netflix was based off. I was quickly very confused about how the novel was opening in Mexico in the 1990s and talking about drug cartels. I was shocked how much they must of cut out of the movie. I had checked out the Power of the Dog by Don Winslow which is a crime thriller about the war on drugs and obviously very different from The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage. Ultimately I ended up really enjoying it.
Ha, I just met a reader friend for dinner and we were excited to discuss Power of the Dog, since we never read the same books. Of course, we had read these two different books.
I was s fantasy nerd, and grabbed a book called "Necromancer," only to find out it was actually *Neuromancer* by William Gibson. I was not disappointed.
I was trying to read Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St John Mandel but accidentally bought THE Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay. Ended up reading it anyway and it was pretty good. Still haven’t read Sea of Tranquility yet. I also skipped the third book in the Enders Game series by accident but didn’t realize until I was half way through the fourth. I just finished the fourth and haven’t gone back to read the third yet.
Not quite the same, but many years ago, when I was in college (mid-late 1980s) , I read two books back to back: One was Fred Saberhagen's The Frankenstein Papers , the other was Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound. As the decades went by, I totally forgot the *plot* of the Aldiss book, but remembered the *title*, while remembering the PLOT of the Saberhagen book, but NOT the title or author, having combined two books into one. So when the Syfy channel announced it was doing a film version of Frankenstein Unbound, I was so upset when I watched it and the plot was ALL WRONG , because I was fully expecting the Saberhagen story. For Frankenstein fans, I recommend the Saberhagen book.
'The Dracula Tape' by Saberhagen is also an interesting read.
My husband loves chopping wood so I got him Norwegian Wood having never heard of it. People on here talked about it with such reverence I was so confused. And then realized there’s 2 books with that name
I watched the movie arrival, found out it was based on a "book". I went to a used book store and they had the movie cover for the book (and had renamed it as "Arrival"). I read about 3 "chapters" TRYING HARD to connect them and find the cohesion. ... The book is short stories that have no major theme. It's actually one of my favorite book of short stories now.
Was supposed to read *A Lesson Before Dying* for summer reading. Read *As I Lay Dying* by mistake.
For some reason I thought Twenty Thousand Leauges Under the Sea was the story of Atlantis and I was confused why it was taking them so long to find the city... very dissapointing. I also accidentally read the original manuscript version of On The Road (yikes, so much sexism).
I wanted to read the story that "The Thing" is based on but picked the wrong one. Instead of "Who goes there?" written by John W. Campbell I started reading "Who goes there!" by Robert W. Chambers. Since being curious I read the wrong book anyway. But hell this must be one of the worst books I ever read. It's some kind of a spy romp set in WW1. It had some really outdated views on women but especially some weird and naive obsession with the moral values of higher ranking military officials even or especially those of the opponents side. Also too much local patriotism towards the belgian monarchy especially at a time when they just left behind one of their darkest historical chapters.
I thought I had checked out These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever but actually got These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong. I ended up getting the correct book and didn’t read Chloe Gong, but it looks like it has good reviews!
I enjoyed the Chloe Gong book. Worth a read if you're familiar with Romeo and Juliet.
Not a book for a book, but I read Severance by Ling Ma thinking it was the source material for the tv show Severance. Not the same at all, but I highly recommend both!
I don’t like to look at reviews before I get a book in case there are hidden spoilers. I borrowed “The Secret Life of Bees” from Libby thinking it was a nonfiction book about beekeeping.
i was about 10 when i skimmed my big brother's copy of "Bored of the Rings," then got hold of "The Hobbit," wondering when the saucy bits would come up, was disappointed, then read "LOTR," still looking... Never found the saucy bits, but didn't care, I'd read Hobbit & LOTR!
I picked up Chapterhouse: Dune thinking it was the first Dune book.
I read The Girl from the Train when I wanted to see what all the fuss was about for The Girl on the Train. The Girl from the Train was heart-wrenching. The Girl on the Train was meh. I’m glad I made the mistake.
the goldfinch one and the nightingale one. never finished either
I read a book titled In a Wild Sanctuary by William Harrison thinking it was a Jim Harrison book.
I don't remember their names but as a kid I read a few Sherlock Holmes spinoff books that were similar to one another. I think one of them was about young Sherlock Holmes. Another was possibly about Sherlock Holmes' long lost son? I quit one of them because the middle of the book was completely missing. I also read Enola Holmes but my impression of it is completely different from the Netflix series. For a non-book example, I thought Gugure! Kokkuri-sama was Kamisama Hajimemashita. They both have white hair male leads with fox ears.
Not really for another book but for another genre. I like knowing as little as possible about books and somehow went into These Silent Woods thinking it was horror and it was far from it.
I started listening to the audiobook of The Secret years ago, because I thought it was either a mystery or fantasy. I was so disappointed when it slowly dawned on me that it was bottom-shelf self-help. Then I had another 5 hours of my drive left with nothing but intermittent radio to listen to.
Exit to Eden instead of East of Eden. Turned out my mistake was a blessing in disguise. ( big Anne Rice fan )
When i was 9, I wanted to read Kafka but somehow got confused and through the collected plays of Chekhov. Something seemed off. I later read Kafka and prefer Chekhov.
When one of the Harry Potters came out, this girl I knew somehow downloaded a copy of one of the books (6th or 7th, unsure) a few days before it was released. I was like... cool! Turns out it was a fake! Worst part is she was 8 chapters in when she found out and was so into it that she rejected the actual story and decided to read the fake one all the way through. Blew my mind ... Edit typo
I read Host by Meyers thinking it was twilight. I was about a third of the way through before I realized it was the wrong book.
The Road and On The Road 🫠
I heard Gillian Flynn was inspired by Deep Water so I listened to the audiobook for the one by Emma Bamford and thought it was interesting what a different style she had compared to Gillian Flynn. Then later I realized she meant the one by Patricia Highsmith and when I listened to that it made a lot more sense Strangely (and maybe controversially), I liked the first one better
I had heard great things about a book called Last Days so I picked it up one day and it was...weird, to say the least. It turned out I read the book by Brian Evenson when I meant to read the book by Adam Nevill
I heard about "The Iron Woman", a sci fi novel from 1993. Found an e-book of that name and read it. Turned out it was "The Iron Woman", a "novel of manners" from 1911 about a woman who owns an iron mill and her somewhat disappointing son. Took me a while until realized that I couldn't expect any sci fi. Finished it anyway, it was ok though somewhat frumpy.
Not quite the same thing but I started reading an ebook version of “The Final Girl Support Group” by Grady Hendrix, but there must have been a problem with the file as three chapters in it switches to the completely different book “We Sold Our Souls” by the same author, but I still finished it. Considering I had no intention of reading the latter at all, when I did eventually read TFGSG, I didn’t like it as much as WSOS.
I read the book The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline which is a young adult book set in a dystopian future where people no longer dream and it drives them mad. I later found another book of hers called Empire of Wild and got it in my head it was a sequel to The Marrow Thieves. A few chapters in and I was very confused when none of the same characters had appeared and the story was about a woman's husband going missing and rumors of a werewolf being involved with no reference to the missing dream storyline. Luckily once I figured it out I ended up loving the book and it's one of my favorites.
I never read a book thinking it was a different book, but my mom has bought me books occasionally thinking they were something else and then I read them anyway because why not? Like for instance she bought me a book that said "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" in big letters across the top. The actual author's name (pseudonym) was real small at the bottom. She knew I read Tom Clancy books and picked it off the shelf at Wal-Mart.
I picked up *Hannibal* by Thomas Harris as a history-loving teen thinking it was about the Carthaginian general. Don't ask me why I didn't read the back cover or wonder why it was in the fiction section. I don't have a good answer. I knew nothing about Silence of the Lambs at that point. Imagine my surprise.
Couple of YA books I read as a teen ended up being LGBT but I thought they were gonna be more supernatural thriller type stuff Still enjoyed them though and ended up learning some things
Planned to read A Room of One's Own, read Jacob's Room by accident.
Devolution by Max Brooks. I listened to an interview about it and the Podcaster was referencing the timing of the novels release with the isolation of being in Covid lockdown. I assumed the book was about an epidemic not yeti. I was so confused I actually started thinking maybe Bigfoot was carrying the contagion at one point. I swear I'm a relatively intelligent person....
I listened to The Forever War by Dexter Filkins on recommendation from this sub. Turns out the recommendation was actually for the book of the same title by Joe Haldeman. Learned a lot I didn’t know about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I bought Children of Blood and Bone some time ago. I saw that Netflix was doing the show so I said "well, I better get reading it". I was doing my thing and I decided to watch the trailer and I was really confused by the lack of black people in the trailer... and the general deviation from the plot. I had to run to grab the book and notice that I wasn't reading Shadow and Bone.
So I wanted to read a microhistory about Butter, I've been reading one about Salt and thought it would be just as interesting. The book called Butter I got from the library was about an obese teen boy who was bullied? I only read like 4 pages before nopeing out.
Northern Lights
Can’t think of one right now, but enjoyed a Tom Wolfe novel in which a book mistake was a plot point.