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...

Has anyone read Boneland-the very belated final book? I had high hopes, but couldn't make head nor tail of it.

However Alan Garner unfortunately failed to give Colin and Susan any personality, something he now acknowledges .

If he'd given them more memorable names, maybe they'd have developed personalities to go with them.

Edmund and Lucy have more personality than Peter and Susan
Titty and Roger and Nancy have more personality than John and Susan.

I once had a friend whose name was Susan who complained that fictional Susans were always dull.

One of Edward Eager's books-Seven Day Magic; had a line about "Johns and Susans always being dull".

Maybe that's why Terry Pratchett chose it for his determinedly down to earth heroine?

Down to earth but refreshingly in no way dull. A beacon of hope to all Susans! It’s definitely been used as a “sensible older sister” name in so many books.

@PineappleSeahorse I ordered a copy online and it just arrived today - read it very happily over lunch. So many happy trigger memories! Thank you for bringing it up!

@NotSoFar I have been trying for years to remember a book I borrowed from the library when I was about 11.

But I couldn’t remember the author, or the title or much of the story, other than it was oddly haunting, about the friendship between two 11-year-old girls who were trying to do magic, and one of the girls died. With so little to go on I didn’t think there was much chance of finding it again.

Then I read your post about Hila Feil’s The Ghost Garden and it was like having a firework go off in my brain. I Googled it and felt almost certain it was my lost book, and then blenched at the prices it was fetching.

The only affordable copy was one battered ex-American public library book which had somehow found its way to a bookseller in the Czech Republic. It arrived in the post yesterday, I have just finished reading it and it is the book that I thought was impossible to find, and I am so pleased to have it again. Thank you!

Oh, I’m so glad, @CatChant ! I read a library copy as a child and only came across it again via inter-library loan well into adulthood, having somehow remembered the name. It stands up to re-reading, doesn’t it? I think it’s brilliantly subtle. I used to live on Cape Cod years ago, and loved the way the novel describes the tourist hordes and the off-season hush. My 11 year old self never thought I would live there… (And yes, the prices are terrifying!)

There are two books from my childhood that it drives me crazy I can't remember.

One was for I guess independent age readers (so middle grade) and all I remember is a tree, two girls and a lion. It definitely wasn't Narnia-related.

One was a picture/rhyming book and it went through the alphabet with various animals doing what I recall being amusing things, in a fairly human way. It was highly illustrated and to my kid brain delightfully weird. I have literally no clue what it was called just that the rhymes were funny.

@NotSoFar How wonderful to have lived on Cape Cod. I don’t think at 11 the name meant anything to me other than “somewhere in America” but I know I would have loved the abandoned garden, the secret room with Victorian toys, and the girls trying to do magic and see ghosts - I never knew anyone else who wanted to be a witch when I was a child, and I did so want to be one!

It does stand up to re-reading very well. I do now appreciate the descriptions of Cape Cod, am amused that the mad hippie household must have just sailed over my head as general grown-up weirdness, and, as an adult and a parent, I’m really horrified at the idea of 11-year-old girls hitch-hiking.

I am so glad you could remember the title. My only hope had been that one day I might bump into it in a secondhand bookshop.

‘The Ginger Tree’ by Oswald Wynd.
’The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot.

Charley by Joan G Robinson.

Lots of favourites on here!

Really liked The Children Who Lived in a Barn - possibly why I recently bought a Wonderbag when I saw it in a charity shop, modern day version of the haybox

Never met anyone else who's mentioned Fifteen by Beverley Clearly before, such cute romance! And The Fortunate Few by Tim Kennemore, I remember some bits of that being quite devastating.

For the DWJ fans among us, there's a recent podcast 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones which is really good. They're going through her books in order of writing though, so lots of good ones still to come.

Weirdstone tunnel trauma definitely, even now when I think of it. The bit where there's water and they each have to make the choice to go through...

@RedOrangePink Thanks for the DWJ podcast suggestion. Will definitely give that a listen.

@GardenFullOfDaffodils Henrietta Lacks was a set text on my MA course!

@RedOrangePink i read Fifteen as a kid and re read it recently, amazed by its innocence when I compared to my then 15 year old! I’ve also read Charley.

can anyone on here remember a book about children in some sort of school in a dystopian regime, they were given names by letters of the alphabet & worked in fields (?). Gradually they realised they were being drugged by the water after one of them drank from the river in the woods (?). I read it in primary school in the early-mid 90s but I was an eclectic reader & it could have been published years beforehand - but probably 70s/80s I would guess?

I bought a book called Hostages to Fortune at an honesty stall about 25 years ago, one of my favourite books - never heard any reference to it by anyone until it was republished by Persephone Books a few years ago - made me feel very smug at my discerning tastes!

Ethan of Athos is a favourite of mine :-)

Yes, exactly to the water-filled tunnel where they each have to decide separately to go through, not knowing whether they’ll be able to come up for air, @RedOrangePink. Or the bit where they have to get down a mineshaft by jumping from wall to wall onto tiny projections. Or the hairpin bend where Colin almost gets stuck because he’s an inch taller than Susan. I’m still so traumatised I called poor personality-less Colin Peter in error — sorry!)

Has anyone who liked Weirdstone and The Moon of Gomrath (which I remember far less well) read Boneland?

Yes I have read Boneland which is certainly not aimed at children. Like all Garner there’s some great writing but it’s fairly baffling in parts. Also Colin has gone from having virtually no personality in the earlier books to having almost too much here. As far as I recall Susan doesn’t feature but it’s a while since I read it.

pollyhemlock; I think the point of Boneland was that Susan went off with the riders that she met at the end of Moon of Gomrath, and a grown-up Colin is trying to find her.

I thought at the end of Moon of Gomrath the riders told Susan that she couldn't ride away with them? She was devastated to be left behind!

I thought at the end of Moon of Gomrath the riders told Susan that she couldn't ride away with them? She was devastated to be left behind!

Well at least she wasn't left behind when all her family died in a train crash because she was too fond of make-up and nylons!

Yes, God forbid that Susan actually, you know, should grow up into a sophisticated woman.

Lots of problems with C.S. Lewis insisting that 'good' girls are innocent and pure of spirit. Ick.

And parties! You can’t be a Friend of Narnia and like a bit of social life!

As far as I remember they came back for her and Colin is trying to find her. Though as he is a nuclear physicist at Jodrell Bank this causes a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. It’s a strange book.

God, I’m going to have read it now. It sounds quite mad.