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...

I had the George Macdonald books read to me as a child and then read them myself many times. Loved Princess and the Goblin - the wonderful mysterious old lady in the attic! Not so keen on Curdie which I seem to remember is quite odd in places.Still have my copy of TPATG with lovely Arthur Hughes illustrations. Never got into Beverley Nichols though.

We had a very old copy of The Princess and Curdie on our bookshelves when I was growing up, @Jux - in my memory it was quite an odd book; I was probably only about 8 or 9 at the time and an omnivorous reader! Can’t imagine why we had an original copy but it may have belonged to a family forbear at some point.

Absolutely agree. I did O and A level Eng Lit and that's the sole reason I didn't go to Uni as the obvious subject I would study would have been Eng Lit (otherwise Maths, and well No Way!). And fhs why would you study something you love when sstudying it ruins it?

So I forgot Uni until my 30s when I found a subject I was likely to find sufficiently stimulating to get me through 3 years of study without ruining it.

Bookworm I am and will always be, thank goodness, and no miserable Marxist or feminist or colonialist interpretations of anything for me!

Mind you, I did appreciate Cote's studies of books, when she used to do them here - very rare but always worth it.

I've read both those too @Jux , a long time ago!

Actually on getting my copy of TPATG out I find the illustrations are by Charles Folkard. This one is very Arthur Rackham-y

Isaac Bashevis Singer. Read all his books as my mother had them. She also liked Vicki Baum and Han Suyin (Love is a many splendoured thing.)

I've read all of those. Did you know there's a third Nicols book-the Mountain of Magic?

Yes!! Those are the ones in the copy I remember! I’d got it in my mind that it was Dulac or Rackham….

And a fourth - The Wickedest Witch in the World with the one and only Miss Smith!

I've read all of those Beverly Nichols and Princess and Goblin books. Except for part 4 ! There is another George MacDonald calledAt The Back of the North Wind but I don't remember that one clearly ..the others I read over and over. Princess Irene!

This might be a very long shot. But does anyone remember a children's book, probably written in the 60s, about a witch who kept getting all her spells wrong. So she decided to secretly practice on a Wednesday (I think?) because it was against the law for witches to perform magic on Wednesdays.

I loved it as a child. But can't track it down.

@Nettleskeins At the Back of the North Wind is distinctly weird if I remember it correctly. There’s a lot of Victorian sentimentality and I think at the end you realise the child is actually dead. But it is many years since I read it.

Talking of Victorian books, anyone else remember Mopsa the Fairy by Jean Ingelow, and The Cuckoo Clock by Mrs Molesworth?

Ah Mrs Molesworth! My junior school library was old fashioned even for the early 1960s and had loads of her books which I read avidly. My granny had a book of her short stories including one called Good Night Winnie which I reread constantly purely for the pleasure of ending up in floods of tears. Spoiler: Winnie dies. Good children often die in Victorian children’s books.

For the Victorians, we have a lot of Mrs Ewing! All still at my mum’s.

Oh and AND, I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned Angela Brazil and her school stories.

Lots of plucky gels. Precursor to Enid Blyton of course, less naughtiness I think.

I read For The School Colours many times can’t remember much of it now!

Oh and AND, I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned Angela Brazil and her school stories.

Oh yes, I read her. I like the ones set during the Great War, which I don't think any other girls' story writer did.

Overall I think Elinor M. Brent-Dyer is the better writer, but AB established the school story as a genre.

Some of AB's books are available on Project Gutenberg.

Brazil, Brent-Dyer, E.J. Oxenham and Dorita Fairlie Bruce were the Big Four girls' story writers between the wars.

I read loads of horse books as a kid/adolescent, and people seem to have heard of most of them apart from the Monica Dickens Favour books. A girl called Rose whose parents run a seaside boarding house is 'called' by a mythical horse called Favour to stop things going wrong, essentially. She finds herself within the body of someone else looking out through their eyes. Favour 'takes' her to do this several times in the early part of the novel, and she has to piece together what's going to happen and how she can intervene to fix it before it does go wrong.
It's really hard to describe them! But I loved them.

Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick. Just don’t!

I had to read a Singer at uni. Cannot remember which one, and even looking at a list online doesn't jog my memory. I seem to remember I liked it though, oddly seeing as I clearly haven't retained it!

Dickie Greenleaf too...

I've read those! (In French!)

I LOVED ThePhantom Tolbooth. It's probably actually a bit clever-clever and annoying (the car that goes without saying...), but at the time it was an eye-opener for me in how you could play tricks with language.

This sounds so heavenly that I've just impulse-ordered a paperback from Amazon!

I didn't get on with Beverly Nichols' children's books but loved his slightly twee books about gardening and houses and cats and village communities - fiction but set more or less in places he actually lived in. Come to think of it, they mightn't be a bad re-read.