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...

Yes, I read and enjoyed this as a child.

Read this too, published together with "The Wonderful O"

Rings bells but not positive

Speaking of Lynne Reid Banks. Did anyone else read The Fairy Rebel?

tweetysylvester · Today 06:41
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Thank you so much for all your replies! I've read the Solitaire Mystery, and The House at World's End by Monica Dickens as a child. Will look more into several of these books.

Do give Harvey Angell (Diana Hendry) a go. Billed as a children’s book, I love it. Such beautiful writing, draws you in from page 1.

@Seeline - I read all the Sue Barton books as a teenager, and I still have my original copies. I do still reread some of my childhood favourites - they are comforting. I have all the Chalet School books.

I also read all the Lone Pine series, by Malcolm Saville, and I still have most of them, though that's one series I've never reread, so I suspect they will not stay on my shelves.

@Cyclistmumgrandma - it's lovely to find other Land of Green Ginger fans - I can still remember the spell Abu Ali has to say, to make the button nosed tortoise back into the magician.

Pi R squared sideways,
The cube root of zero.
Manganese potash and mushrooms on toast.
Leaf of the Lily, and I, Abu Ali
Turn you back into the man you miss most.

There's a book of sci fi short stories I read as an older child that I've never forgotten. In one of the stories, young people have plastic surgery to look older as that is the trend at that time in the future. In another story, teenagers have to choose between living an amazing life and dying young, or living a long time and life being a bit boring. The only other story I remember is some children going back in time to the 1940s from their own time in which everything is sterile and disposable and noone does any work (spoiler - they prefer the 1940s).

If anyone else read these and remembers the author ( I think female, maybe British, 1980s or 1990s) I would be so grateful. And highly recommend the book.

I have two books with a plots which have stayed with me when the titles and authors have long since vanished.

1. Boy is given a watch by a mysterious man. The next day all the clocks in the world stop. Except for his watch.

1. A chemical to 'eat' waste plastic poisons most of the western world, leading to mass evacuation of western children to poorer countries.

@Castlereagh , the short stories were in a book called Changing Times by Tim Kennemore.

Or might be Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (Tim Kennemore again). Anyway, definitely by her. I also enjoyed her book about Gymnastics as a crowd hooligan style sport, The Fortunate Few.

The Tim Kennemore short stories are in a booked called 'Here Tomorrow, Gone Today'. 'Changing Times' is a novel about a girl who can travel backwards and forwards in her own life by means of adjusting the time on an old clock. I also enjoyed The Fortunate Few and Wall of Words.

Tim Kennemore is brilliant! I especially liked ‘Cleo the Vigilant’ in Here Tomorrow, Gone Today, and the backstory to the story about the mother trying to wean her children off TV and gaming where cheesecake has taken over as the main fast food craze. And Changing Times is just a solidly good novel. The bit where she time travels into her own future is not just chillingly well written (how do you soothe a baby you’ve never met, even though it’s your baby? How do you take a child to school when you have no idea where the school is, even though in your future, you do this every day?), but an excellent cautionary tale for any girl who found her teenage boyfriend’s ‘protectiveness’ charming.

’Masked Granny’! The narrator is an ineffectual father watching his teenagers turn themselves into octogenarians and his wife trying out bit of her daughter’s ageing cream! His son is shuffling around with a zimmer frame.

Totally agree. 'Salmonella' and 'Reputation' were my favourite stories in 'Here Tomorrow, Gone Today'.

Tim Kennemore wrote another really good school-based short story called 'A Very Positive Moment' which I'd thought was in that collection but isn't, I eventually tracked it down to a collection of stories by various writers called 'In a Class of Their Own'.

'Changing Times' is such a convincing account of the way you'd react to time travel. I loved the way it gradually dawned on Victoria what had happened when she initially travelled back about six months. Also the realism of the future travel - that there was no dramatic change in her surroundings, for example.

Oh, I forgot ‘Salmonella’ — the breakfast war, and the attractive and attractively-named Sheridan Wilder on the bus, who turns out to be so nasty! One of those awful teenage moments you think will define you forever as at the bottom of the social totem pole, until the blessed realisation that post-school life operates on entirely different lines.

Yes - in 'Cleo the Vigilant' which is set in the same school, one of the characters makes a passing reference to 'that first year, Julia whatshername who had a nervous breakdown' - so one assumes this is Julia Rice of 'Salmonella'! I'd like to hope her awful, insensitive mother let her change schools after that.

I forgot that. Poor Julia. I like to imagine her cutting a dash at Oxford or somewhere in a few years.

@Matildatoldsuchdreadfullies @SwanOfThoseThings @NotSoFar thank you so much for remembering all those details, you've all made my day- off to try and find the books now! She is/was an amazing writer and I think a lot of it is still really relevant for teenage girls today.

Oh, I just loved the Drina books. I had a couple from when I was a child but mostly read them as Library books.

About 20 years ago, I found a stash of them at a boot fair and I’ve still got them in the bottom of the drawer somewhere waiting for the days of being able to read to a granddaughter.

I suppose I better read them again to make sure they’re suitable now

He wrote The Painted Veil didn’t he.

I loved The Painted Veil and the short stories

As a child I loved National Velvet who wins a piebald horse in a raffle.
Also The Curse of the Wise Woman by Edwin Dunsany which is a semi fantasy novel set in Ireland and is ahead of its time in that the narrator’s father years before had sold an option to a company to harvest peat and had forgotten about it.
The company then took up the option and to the horror of the narrator started building vast machinery and destroying the environment and wildlife.
However, maybe all is not lost …

I read and loved several Gene Stratton Porter books when I was a teenager as my mother had them - 'Freckles', 'Girl of the Limberlost', 'The Harvester'. Found them on Gutenberg recently but there are some rather salacious sexual overtones that I didn't pick up at the time! But she was an early conservationist: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/gene-stratton-porter-americas-fading-natural-beauty-180974161/

Did anyone else read 'The Wheel on the School' by Meindert DeJong?

And Antonia Ridge - particularly 'Family Album' and 'Cousin Jan'?

Aldous Huxley: Chrome Yellow

George Orwell: Coming up for Air

Anthony Burgess: Enderby

Evelyn Waugh: Sword of Honour

Patrick Fermor: A Time of Silence

All five authors are famous, but people who’ve read them rarely seem to have read the ones I’ve listed. They’ve just read their most famous book and nothing more.

I've read Chrome Yellow and found the story-within-a-story of Sir Hercules and Filomena almost unbearably poignant.

I do remember reading The Wheel on the School, @JennyChawleigh!

Admit it's true for me for all of those except Coming up for Air - I've read everything of Orwell's including essays and diaries because I'm a great fan.