Books you thought no one else has read

[tweetysylvester]

It's so fun to find rare books to read, or just look up or hear about less known books, so thought I'd start a thread about this. Nostalgic novels, YA books, current titles you discovered very randomly...

OMG A Candle in her Room freaked me out - I've never done well with spooky books. I've hung onto a lot of my childrens' books but not that one. How disappointing if it's now worth a lot of money!

A Wheel on the School with the storks; that was more within my comfort zone.

I loved Coming Up For Air and Keep The Aspidistras Flying, preferred them to The Clergymans Daughter although that one wasn't bad either but found Wigan Pier very illuminating. I've yet to read Down and Out in Paris and London.

@highlandcoo I remember The Wheel On the School!

Loved these two!
Absolutely blew my mind when I found out JBS Haldane was a well known and influential biologist/evolutionary scientist.

Pennington, Will in Flambards, Jonathan Meredith in Prove Yourself a Hero/ Midsummer Night's Death (and also crosses over with the Ruth Hollis books in The Team) K.M. Peyton did write crushable teens well. Talking of Ruth, I remember in Fly'By-Night, her brother earning £10 a week, and 1980s me realised inflation and the value if money must I deed be a thing.

I read one of her more recent ones, Blue Skies and Gunfire, in which a girl falls in love with both brothers on a nearby farm in WW2, one of whom is a pilot in the RAF... So a bit of a theme. Though the bit I remember most about that one was going round the bypass - and I had not thought bypasses existed until about the 1970s, but there were indeed some pre-war ones.

I'm still a huge KMP fan, and have read almost everything, except some of the pony ones aimed at younger readers. I liked the Roman Minna ones.

I still have my Flambards book, I can’t remember how many but at least three I think. It was on TV in either the late seventies or early 1980’s and I used to watch it at my nans house as we’d be there the evening it was shown.

I think it was illegal to marry your husbands brother before ww1 but a shortage of men changed all that (someone put me right if I’m wrong).

Some children's books I reað that no one else seems to have:

Brandon Chase by BB

Miss Masham's Repose by T H White

Catch As Catch Can by Margaret J Baker (very obscure book about a pair of porcelain antique staffordshire spaniels that are meant to be sold as a pair but get seperated. A favourite book of mine as a child.

It was on TV in either the late seventies or early 1980’s and I used to watch it at my nans house as we’d be there the evening it was shown.

I recently got the DVDs second hand - recently enough that I've not actually watched it yet. We didn't have TV, so I've never seen it.

It was the 1921 Marriage Act, for women to marry their deceased husband's brother; men could already marry their deceased wife's sister since 1907, so there was also an element of making things equal as much as dealing with the shortage of men.

(I have never gone for the same men as my sister, and most of the boyfriends I've had were either single children or had sisters. Not that I've ever married anyone, let alone consecutive brothers.)

My mum loved them. Might see if we still have her copies.

There are 4 Flambards books.

Fuck. Yes mine had those illustrations...

@TakeMyLifeAndLetItBe
I don't know that one, I'll check it out - Brendon Chase was my favourite as a child.

Rebecca’s World was read to us in middle school! Mr Woodcock did all the voices and actions and we absolutely loved it. A few of us loved it so much he ordered us copies and we brought money in from home to buy one. I wish I’d kept my copy.

It was a bit Hitchhiker’s, iirc. Very funny.

The Backlisted podcast did an episode on Laxness. It was so good I ended up reading Fish Can Sing 😊

I loved Brendon Chase and Lord of the Forest.

the Bewitching of Alison Albright and Gumble’s Yard were 2 more. Though everyone at the time had read Gumble’s Yard some of the other John Rowe Townsend books were a bit more under the radar.

Violet Needham books were very good - Ruritanian adventure for children as spies and messengers across borders.

The Fortnight in September by RCC Sherriff. An almost unbearably poignant novel, ostensibly about a lower middle class family going on holiday, but in fact it’s about class tension, family, the sadness of change, endings…and yet it manages to be funny. It’s wonderful.

The Dancing Pony, by Lilias Edwards. I adored this book about a girl who befriends an old vegetable seller and his horse. It’s probably the reason I have a pregnant mare living in the lap of luxury at my expense 😊

The Haunting of Cassie Palmer by Vivien Alcock. Very spooky.

The Lily Pickle Band Book by Gwen Grant. Very funny Northern humour. I was lucky enough to meet a friend of the author when I had a bookshop, and was able to write to her and tell her I was a fan.

Daisy by Jenny Butterworth. A teenage girl goes to live with her sensible aunt after her layabout dad gets hit by a car. She plays the flute, iirc. I loved it, and the front cover was lovely. I managed to track a copy down a few years ago.

I loved Coming Up For Air and Mandy, too. I remember the seashell wall from the latter, all these years later.

I strongly recommend the Backlisted podcast, it’s all about these lost gems.

The Fortnight in September by RCC Sherriff. An almost unbearably poignant novel, ostensibly about a lower middle class family going on holiday, but in fact it’s about class tension, family, the sadness of change, endings…and yet it manages to be funny. It’s wonderful

You're another candidate for the Rather Dated Book Club, @LunaNorth! we did this one.

Backlisted is great but, interestingly, I did recently read something they raved about and for the first time ever, I didn’t think it lived up to their praise. Funnily enough I almost feel its charm lies in the pleasure of hearing other people enthuse about the books you already love yourself, iyswim.

Brendon Chase was and remains one of my all time favourites. Such evocative illustrations too.

I think I'd turn the air blue with effing and jeffing. It's really valuable, but if you're like most of us and don't really know how it happens or why some out-of-print books become very sought after while others don't, it's very easily done.

@Barbadossunset it's called "My Life, My Tapes" and it's the autobiography of the FBI agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks. It does foreshadow some of the things from Twin Peaks, and we find out about Diane too.

It starts with his childhood. There's a section in which he talks about getting into audio recordings in his childhood and he's given one of those old fashioned tape recorders for his birthday. He tries to record goings on in his local area but he can't go further from the house than his power cable can reach. He calls it The Tether of Life. I still refer to the power cable on my laptop as the Tether of Life.

I loved these, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources! I have no idea now how I came across them in 80's but I remember them being beautifully written. Maybe I saw the films first 🤷🏻‍♀️

The Haunting of Cassie Palmer is excellent. I think I had a mild crush on Deverill, and when I read it as a child I loved how it swung back and forth between the mundane and the supernatural, and the way Cassie was both teenagely annoyed at getting sent off upstairs with a sandwich and her homework while her mother holds seances, and also desperate not to develop psychic powers.

I suspect that if I read it now, I’d see it as more about a desperate single parent trying to make a living and hoping her uncooperative 13 year old has a marketable skill!

Me too with the crush on Deverill.

Another great favourite was Satchkin Patchkin - a fairy story, lovely poetic language, with a memorable villain "a lean man, a mean man, a man without a smile". It deserves to be better known than it is.

"Satchkin Patchkin, come and lift the latchkin..."

I just "heard" that in my late mother's voice when I read your post. She was a drama teacher and her bedtime reading was brilliant when we were small.

Thank you.

Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin.
The Good Companions by J.B.Priestley.

I still have quite a few Puffin and Peacock paperbacks from the 60s - "Redcap Runs Away" about a boy who joins a travelling band of minstrels in medieval England is a favourite.

And did anyone read Eleanor Farjeon's fairy tales?