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...

Yep. I remember that.

Anyone else read Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo?

@EBearhug totally agree about Oreos etc. being huge disappointments. And @Stormyinacoffeemug I have all the Liz Berry books. Also the Janie series. Really odd dynamic but I thought it was super romantic. I have hidden them where my teen daughter cannot read.
I actually read the whole Lymond series because of seeing it recommended on here.
My lost books are Fattypuffs and Thinnifers by André Maurois. I was unable to find copy for my kids.
I have a well read copy of How Opal Mehta got wild, got kissed and got a life. My 15yp loved it too when she was younger and lends it out to careful people!
I don't think it was unusual then, but you don't hear many people talking about Robert Cormier any more. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway etc.
I bought The Changeover by Margaret Mahy for my daughter but she was really unimpressed.
Both kids love Diana Wynne Jones at least.
Toddler books that I can't buy as gifts anymore because £££ as out of print include: The Sea and Once There Were Giant by Martin Wadell and Hand Hand Fingers Thumb. Also Little Monsters by Jan P who illustrated Meg, Mog and Owl. I have kept as many books as I can tho'

Isn't it sad that books go out of print.

I know it's market driven etc, but so much hard work and effort gets put into writing them, that I find it really upsetting tbh.

Just because something was unpopular, doesn't mean it wasn't really good!

I loved the Changeover. Margaret Mahy did some good stuff.

I assume you have searched Abebooks and similar sites for ones you can't find? I have a search saved for one of the Malcolm Saville Buckingham books, but every time I get a mail to say a copy is available, which happens once or twice a year, by the time I log on after work, it's already gone again.

Loved this so much back in the day!

Weird that The Changeover was mentioned. After reading this thread a few days ago I remembered the book with the hand stamp that I've never been able to remember what it was - think I only read the first part. Did some google-fu and this book came up.... want to read it to see if it's the same!

Ah I have found my Changeover people. The other book I bought for my, then, tween was Chartbreak by Gillian Cross. About a girl who felt out of place and became a pop star but who was tall and solid and who didn't really get the boy in the end. I put it in my Little Free Library after it was repeatedly rejected. I loved that too
And yes, I am quite good at sourcing books but some do just seem £££. We have amazing charity shops near us tho' so I live in hope.

@Fasterthan40 - Fattipuffs and Thinifers is available on Abebooks - @EBearhug is right - here.

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius thank you. It was more the toddler books for gifts. Cousins came over to the U.K. recently with little kids and I wanted to gift some of our old favourites. But I might buy Fattypuffs just to baffle my kids.

My lost books are Fattypuffs and Thinnifers by André Maurois. I was unable to find copy for my kids.

I loved that book as a child and my copy is also lost.

Anything by Cornell Woolrich. A contemporary of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but nowhere near as well known.

The Bumblebee Flies Anyway was heart wrenching to tween me. Likewise I Am the Cheese. In fact all of his novels — I don’t think I ever felt able to face the sequel to The Chocolate War.

I’ve read some of his!

@NotSoFar do you know I think I might hunt out his books. I loved them so much when I was younger that I should at least offer to my kids who share alot of my tastes. I was a teen librarian - dream job in the large children's area. Swear we were flooded with Robert Cormier books back then.

Absolutely loved Margaret Mahy. My favourite was a book of stories called The Chewing Gum Rescue & other stories, but I’m sure there were others I read too.

We did similar buying some out of print Jan Pienkowski books when the children were little - probably my all time favourite illustrator.

Plus also I do remember fattypuffs and thinnifers. It was on the same bit of bookshelf as The Bongleweed by Helen Cresswell, and some other book I can’t remember the name of, where kids found some weird fluffy / spiky creatures that were somewhat troublesome, and they somehow had to trap them down a drain with a grating. One of them was taken into school. If it doesn’t come to me soon, I’m texting my parents!

@Talipesmum was it Bogwoppit? Used to love that!

I loved Terry Nation’s Rebecca’s World too and can’t believe it’s out of print. When I realised the absurd prices old copies were fetching I was so relieved I had kept my battered childhood paperback so I could read it to the DC. They loved it too.

Cold Christmas is my favourite Nina Beechcroft but she wrote several magical and haunting children’s books that seem to have quite forgotten now, except on MN.

The one that astounds me that it is not better known is Penelope Lively’s amazing The Voyage of QV66, which is both a wonderful and very funny adventure story for children about a group of animals travelling through a flooded world abandoned by humans, and a clever satire on the delusions societies can fall prey to.

It is very satisfying to read aloud and my DC adored, and still adore it too. Yet I have never encountered anyone else who has heard of it, even though the author is a well known Booker prize and Carnegie medal winner. I was so delighted to see it stocked in a marvellous independent bookshop recently - definitely my kind of bookshop.

Ruth McKenney’s memoirs My Sister Eileen, about growing up in Ohio between the World Wars, and Far, Far from Home, about living as an expatriate with her husband and children in post-war Brussels are very funny in a similar vein to Betty MacDonald’s Onions in the Stew et al. I hope they’re better known in the US because no one seems to have heard of them here.

And I must put in a plea for Gillian Linscott’s resourceful and intelligent suffragette detective Nell Bray. There are 11 very readable novels, I think my favourites were Widow’s Peak and Hanging on the Wire, and I think the series was moderately successful in the eighties and nineties, but there has been nothing since 2003 and I haven’t seen them in bookshops in a very long time. They deserve to be better known.

Oh and fellow Penny’s Way fan - I loved it. I wish there had been a sequel. A school story that compares with Antonia Forest. It’s also the reason 7 x 8 = 56 is unforgettable for me.

One of my childhood favourites, too!

Also loved everything by Robin McKinley especially 'Beauty' and 'Deerskin.'

'The Mists of Avalon' by Marion Zimmer Bradley made a huge impact on me and is responsible for my lifelong interest in folklore and mythology. But since learning the truth about MZB I cannot bring myself to ever read it again.

'The Sisters' Tale' by Frances Castle. Set in Ireland during the Dark Ages, part romance and part adventure. Very poetic.

Thank you!! That was it! I was actually hoping you might know, given the similarity of your bookshelves 😁

@shellyleppard I was at dinner one evening and when The Dark Tower books were mentioned a man opposite me looked on in utter disbelief when I said I had read them all .
I don’t know why !
Luckily DH was with me and piped up that he had also read them all, as has our DC .
Stephen King is a genius.
I don’t know anyone outside of my family who has read Flowers for Algernon and I do talk books a lot.

This thread had me thinking about another book I read as a child. The Log of the Ark by Kenneth Walker. I read it in the Puffin edition - I remember feeling felt very sad about the Clidders (who dissolved in the rain).

Flowers for Algernon is one of my favourite books. 😁
Although the scene at the end when he goes back to his teacher is really sad.

@Karistyleaftea I'm glad I'm not the only Stephen king fan. Was flowers for Algernon by Virginia Andrews??? I remember seeing it in the library but never read it

@Talipesmum yes we definitely had similar bookshelves. I do feel a bit sad for my kids because I buy books rather than going to the library like I used to. I think it takes away the chance encounters. That said they are able to read book series in order and I even discovered that there were five of the Pamela Brown Swish of the Stage Curtain, whereas I had only read the first.
Our library's kids' section is lots of celeb author books or books written by people with social agendas. I just want really good stories for them - good if they represent a wide range of people but the story also matters.
So I spent ages on book forums trying to work out what might tempt them to read. No issues at all with older. Younger is dyslexic so uses audiobooks and then you have difficulty of finding a good narrator and lots of the old books haven't been recorded.