"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"Yes, absolutely it has to surprise us.  Surprise is the very basis of art.  Isn't it?"

"Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times about his experience of being a judge for the National Book Awards. ... He didn't entirely enjoy the task.  The title of his article was 'Caution: Reading Can Be Hazardous.'  Of the numerous volumes he had to read, he wrote, 'There were moments when I began to doubt the whole enterprise of fiction writing itself.  Does the world really need hundreds and hundreds of new novels or story collections every year, especially when so many of them are so similar?  Eventually, I had trouble keeping all the stories straight, and in my mind—and even in my dreams occasionally—the book overlapped, with couples failing to understand each other over and over again, and families endlessly dumping their woes onto the next generation.'  McGrath's frustration here would seem to be about subject matter.  Why always the oh-so-familiar psychology of couples and families?"

"How I love the fun of a shocker, the I-had-no-idea-wouldn't-have-guessed-in-a-million-years surprise.  My jaded self reads the summary of a movie or book and thinks, 'Well, I know what that will be about.  No thank you.'"  How I love to be proven wrong."