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...

We read The Wheel On The School too and also The House of Sixty Fathers by the same author. I’ve never forgotten the name of that pig.

Yes, I have read The Nightwatch Winter and its prequel Creed Country. I have them both. They are great books, clearly influenced by Antonia Forest, but nothing wrong with that.

There are some excellent books mentioned on this thread. Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks was a great favourite in our house and is one of those books which is endlessly quotable,as in ‘We all have our faults and mine is being wicked’ or ‘ What does its ghastly presence signify?’ Still used in our family to this day.

I remember these books. So nice and wholesome.

Does anyone else remember the Pennington quartet by K M Peyton? I had a bit of a thing for Penn when I was much younger.
Also Fifteen by Beverley Cleary. I was a very romantic teenager!

I adored Rebecca’s World. Took me forever to find the title, all I could remember was the character who killed the ghosts with a bit of wood 😳
Really excellent children’s book!!

OH MY GOD. I’ve been trying to remember the name of this book for years! Thank you! Your comment just triggered a memory, went to google, read a short description, searched images, and found the front cover I remember! I remember loving it, but I remember so little about it. Was there something about eating a sugary rose petal? Definitely rose fairies involved somehow.

I read it in the waiting room for a piano exam. I remember that much!

This was the front cover i remember. Very different from the one available on Amazon!

That’s right! 😃

I read The Magic Garden as a teenager.

The autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper. I've never met anyone who's read it!

Not A Candle In Her Room? Copies of that one are like hen's teeth and consequently eye-wateringly expensive. The hardback with Margery Gill's illustrations is currently online for £657. I really want it as it's a fab book, but there are limits!

I've read Coming Up For Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying and enjoyed them, but not as much as Orwell's essays. I think he's far better a polemicist than he is at fiction.

Not that but I read the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer!

Blackcountry I was just going to post, I too had a thing for Pennington! Did you read the whole trilogy? Teenage me felt quite envious of Ruth when they got married and had a baby. Tbf he was a bit self centred wasn’t he?
also read;
Monica Dickens, Family at One End St, Diana Pullein Thompson and Ruby Ferguson, Fifteen, George Orwell and probably some others.

Did Tim Kennamore write something about a girl who was a gymnast at national level and it was super competitive and very toxic?

@marthasmum I did read all the Penningnton books. At the time I thought Ruth was very lucky. Decades on I see their relationship differently and I agree with you.
I liked Family at One End Street as well.

@marthasmum yes, The Fortunate Few. I read that one too. It came up on another thread recently.

Oh yes!! Thank you. That was a great book too.
a rag a bone and a hank of hair was another one mentioned up thread - very spooky.
how about Playing Beattie Bow? - another spooky one

Not those, but I loved the Flambards series

Oh I loved flambards too! I was also in love with Will, I feel there is a bit of a theme here 😂
though my sister pointed out recently that Christina’s love life might have worked out better if she had looked a bit further afield for her husbands…

That sounds interesting - what is it about?

Well, yes, as a strategy, "marry every eligible male on the farm" isn't the best life plan.

Oh yes, I remember reading this many years ago!

It's a sequel to The Far Distant Oxus, which I read many years ago.

One I loved as a child was Penny's Way (Mary K Harris). Long out of print though I found a secondhand copy as an adult. So well observed. Penny's struggles at the grammar school, her friendships and family life, her well intentioned mistakes. Never met anyone else who has read it.

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.