One thing for me was how light hearted and funny Lenin was. I expected it to be really hard going like a lot of Marx but he had such a wit about him and I remember laughing out loud a few times by his turn of phrase. I don’t think he gets enough credit for it, he took a really serious, dry subject and made it enjoyable to read. He really was an incredible writer.
How it completely changed the way I think. You expect some things to stick off course, but reading Marx, Engels, Lenin, Parenti etc. changed the way I look at news, politics, movies, consumerism, basically everything.
I never expected the theory to have this much influence over my life.