There’s a book I love that no one else knows about. It caught my eye in the middle school library, magically shelved right in the spot of the fiction section where I liked to read, curled up safely in the corner. The cover was eerily appealing, with dandelions framing a three-faced figure. Her pointy faces looked angry. But the fox on the spine looked nice.
Some years later, I found a new copy of this book, Pat O’Shea’s The Hounds of the Morrigan, with a new cover: a gorgeous Kinuko Craft painting that I loved even though it didn’t look right to my young self’s memory of the book. The book isn’t lush and rich but spry and scrappy, a story about Pidge and his sister Brigit, about Cooroo the fox and magic candies and a lot more details that I remember disjointedly. A spider named Napoleon. Wanting the hounds to be nice. The cover wasn’t my cover, but I was still thrilled to see the book available again: Maybe someone else would read it!
I still only know one person who knows this story. I know there are other readers out there, but it feels like I love this one alone. Don’t you have a book like that? And isn’t it a weird feeling?
What I’m not sure about is why this feeling now seems so weird. I’ve said before that I didn’t know, for most of my life, that being a reader could be a thing, a hobby, a kind of fandom. Reading was just what I did in between climbing trees and riding my bike. As I got older, I had one friend who read what I read, fantasy novels passing between us while our classmates read true crime and thrillers. It wasn’t until my first job in children’s publishing that I was regularly around people who had read at least some of the same books as me—books we loved as kids, books we read for work, classics like The Book of Three and Over Sea, Under Stone and new loves like Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series and M.T. Anderson’s Feed.
Reading is a solitary activity, but at some point it became more than that. I sought out like-minded people on LiveJournal, on Twitter, on websites and platforms long dead and gone; I made more bookish friends, worked in a bookstore, worked in publishing again. I recommended books to customers and colleagues and took their recommendations in turn, and somewhere along the line discovered the absolute glee that happens when two (or more) people who just really, really love a book start talking about it. That glee is contagious in the best possible way. It feels like it multiplies exponentially. It feels like it needs to be shared.
There are a lot of good (and many terrible) things about being online, but bookish community—any community that lets you have those moments of delight (and sometimes rage) with other people—is one of the good things. Sure, reading is solitary, but the full experience of a book doesn’t have to be. There are so many ways to find bookish connections now—with other readers, with the authors themselves, with essays and articles and blogs and even just a single tweet that gives you a new perspective on a long-loved book.
And so, the lost books, the ones no one seems to remember or never read, the authors that never reached the peak of commonality, at least in one’s own corner of the world—those feel ever more lonesome. It’s like they occupy space differently or vibrate at a different frequency in my mind. I know there are people out there who also adore The Hounds of the Morrigan, who would also give up a lot to be able to peek at O’Shea’s unfinished sequel. There are other Jo Clayton fans, readers who fell hard for a green girl named Serroi and the woman with the diadem on her head and all the many books that came after. I have still never met anyone else who’s even heard of Kathleen Sky’s Witchdame, but I know they’re out there too. Stormwarden? The Keeper of the Isis Light? I almost thought I dreamed that one until it got reissued a while back.
These are the books I buy whenever I find them on used shelves, ready with an extra copy to shove into a friend’s hand if she shows even the slightest bit of curiosity. I’ve done this enough times with Franny Billingsley’s Chime that I no longer feel alone in my love for it.
That is one of the more practical and proactive ways to find more readers of your most beloved, underappreciated books: find copies and give them to people. (Assuming you can find copies. Assuming they aren’t rare and haven’t been out of print for decades.) But don’t you want serendipity sometimes? That feeling of stumbling onto a copy of a book you forgot you’d been looking for—but instead, stumbling onto a person who also loves that book? There’s something fairy-tale-like about these books, overlooked, hidden right out in the open, our own copies coffee-stained and coverworn. Like they have secrets that you can’t discuss with someone else unless they say certain things first. Like just saying the title to the right other person is a kind of spell.
Online, there are some books around which huge communities have sprung up, massive, passionate fandoms trading fanart and the greatest Tumblr posts and quotes and fic and jokes and memes and dreamcasts. There are TV adaptations that turn years-old novels into bestsellers, until you can’t go anywhere without seeing somebody reading one of them, or spot a paperback abandoned on a subway seat. It’s exhilarating to see these things happen, to watch books fly into the pop culture stratosphere, brightly lit and reflected in a million shining eyes.
But some books—not unlike some readers—are wallflowers. The spotlight might still be nice. A little more glow, a few more pairs of eyes. A minor renaissance. But it’s comfortable over here in the corner, with a wall to lean on while we read. Don’t we all love some wallflowers? What are yours?
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
Living Alone by Stella Benson – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14907
“This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a trespasser.”
The Green Book, Jill Paton Walsh.
Le Guin’s Powers won a freaking Nebula but I still feel like I’m the only person who adores it. Go figure.
I’m glad you mentioned The Book of Three and Under Sea Over Stone. Not many of us left who’ve read that.
Cheers,
B
I don’t see many Kage Baker fans around and for the life of me I can’t understand why. Her books are epic and her writing is masterful, she’s hilarious, her characters still take up space in my head, and she wrote well in short and long form.
I hope to meet another fan in person someday so we can fan out together.
Yessss, Anvil of the World is SUCH a favourite <3
I loved the book “Talargain” when I was young and I’m set to grab my copy as soon as I finish here. Molly Hunter seems to be seldom mentioned, as well as Nicholas Stuart Grey. But I recommend Geraldine Harris most of all.
I hardly ever meet anyone who’s familiar with L.M. Boston’s “Green Knowe” series.
The book “Talargain” was big on my list when I was young, and I’m ready to go grab it as soon as I finish here. Molly Hunter and Nicholas Stuart Grey were also favorites who don’t seem to get mentioned much anymore, but the author I really want to bring to people’s attention is Geraldine Harris. She wrote a four book series with elements of Mediterranean and European cultures. Wonderful characters, an absorbing quest, and a bittersweet ending.
I’ve noted it in at least one other comment since it’s genre-adjacent, but my prime example here is The Beginning of Unbelief by Robin D. Jones (1993). Protagonist Hal is in his mid-teens but his childhood imaginary friend Zach is still hanging around and bugging him, so Hal starts an ambitious sci-fi story in an attempt to banish Zach to some other place in the universe.
I was about 15 when I read The Beginning of Unbelief, which is short but intellectually sophisticated, and it really spoke to me, which is why I got indignant when I discovered that it was decidedly obscure. The publisher is mainstream (Delacorte), but or a couple of decades after the book’s release, there didn’t seem to be more than about a dozen people on the Internet who had ever heard of it. Even the Amazon listing had the author’s name totally mangled for a while.
I first heard of The Beginning of Unbelief thanks to another book: Sarah Ellis’s The Young Writer’s Companion, which was a hybrid of notebook and writing advice/inspiration, released in 1998 and aimed at adolescent aspiring creative writers (the author is a novelist and children’s librarian in Canada, where I grew up). By 2001, the combination of my increasing age and the advancement of technology made me realize that I could order books via the Internet. The Beginning of Unbelief was atop my list as a book that sounded fascinating that I’d never been able to find in libraries or bookstores. So that year, I bought a copy via some eBay subsidiary called Half.com that I imagine no longer exists. It was a bit of a gamble to order a copy of a hardcover book that I’d never read from the U.S., especially as I only had so much money of my own at the time, but it really paid off. I treasure that very copy to this day.
My mother read the The Hounds of the Morrigan to me and my brother when we were little. I haven’t read it since then, but the thumbprint maze and the attack using the whites of her fingernails as blades really stuck in my mind.
For me the book that no one outside my family seems to have read is the Riddle-Master trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip. Things move back and forth between dreams and reality, the power of silence and music, wind and the ocean, immortal shapeshifters. It’s hard to describe, but I wish more people would read it. It’s luminous.
Omg! CHIME!! Yes!!!
Many people know Frances Hodgson Burnett for her books The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Little Princess. But my introduction to her was the discovery when I was a child, somewhere in some forgotten corner of an old library, a different book: Two Little Pilgrim’s Progress: A Story of the City Beautiful. I’ve never met anyone else who had read or even knew of this book.
J.D. Jordan- Calamity: Being an Account of Calamity Jane and Her Gunslinging Green Man
The story a 15 year old Calamity Jane and her escapades in the Old West with an alien known only as The Green Man. It’s also, as far as I can tell, Jordan’s only novel
Oh, I loved Hounds of the Morrigan! I read it many, many times!
I was also obsessed in that adoring way with Sister Light, Sister Dark, and even though it’s by Jane frickin Yolen, I feel like no one else I know has ever heard of that one, let alone was as attached as I remember being. (I should really re-read it, and Hounds, to see if the magic holds!)
@6 I remember Green Knowe!
@11 I was big into The Lost Prince as a tween, personally. Don’t know what that says about me. I just know I was exasperated when I saw a Big Name Author(tm) sneer at it for its “painfully obvious” plot twists. It’s a CHILDREN’S BOOK you walnut!
@13 SLSD definitely holds up, though the sequels really don’t, IMO.
The Keeper of the Isis Light was by Monica Hughes, who has some other not well known favourites of mine. Devil on My Back and The Dream Catcher are two linked books about small communities who survived a global apocalypse, and Invitation to the Game involved an interesting solution to a world where young people started out disenfranchised due to jobs being taken over by robots.
Second for Kage Baker — how is she already forgotten? But apparently she is. I love her books, own everything she has ever written, and now save re-reads for when I really need them, like when I’m recovering from the flu or like that. If you haven’t tapped into her series — she has two, one about cyborgs and the other about a fantasy world — 10/10, highly recommend!
@@.-@, @16, kudos for Kage Baker. My collection is still growing, I just added The Anvil of the World and the SubPress limited edition of On Land and On Sea. I met her in 2005 at the Nebulas and told her how much I enjoyed her work. I’m so glad I did that, since she died less than five years later.
Second the recommendation for the Riddlemaster trilogy. I think it’s still my favorite of all McKillip’s works.
Love the Riddlemaster trilogy and the Cygnet books (love anything by Patricia McKillip really)
Janny Wurts (Stormwarden) is really underrated. I especially like the Daughter of Empire trilogy she wrote with Raymond Feist – even now 30 years later there are so few books that follow a heroine through the stages of her life (and even fewer where the heroine isn’t a master assassin, powerful sorceress, secret princess, or prophesied chosen one)
Obscure books I really like:
The Bug Wars by Robert Asprin (all alien POV and zero humans anywhere)
Catastrophe’s Spell series by Mayer Alan Brenner
Sarah Vettel’s Isavalta books
Karl Schroeder’s Permanence
I loved the Hounds of the Morrigan! I’m going to have to reread it- it struck a strong chord in me as a kid for all the reasons mentioned (including the wild and weird cover), but I never owned a copy.
As a precocious reader working my way through the older books in the children’s section of my public library in the 80s, I knew almost no one who was interested in the authors I loved, including Lloyd Alexander, Rosemary Sutcliff, and T.H. White. It was an odd surprise when other kids in my 6th grade class read the Hobbit as an assignment, a book I’d already reasons dozens of times- I’d never had anyone to talk to about fantasy worlds before!
The Addams Family, by Jack Sharkey, courtesy of a school thing by which we could order books. This one was written at the adult level and so quite confusing for me at 10 [even though I was ahead in reading and could read the words fine], but I held onto it, and a couple of years later there was The Munsters, by Morton Cooper, discarded by a cousin. My parents never would get us a tv so I couldn’t watch the shows I was so curious about, but I knew I had somehow found my people, or relatives thereof. Despite that I came to realize the Munsters were both horribly naive and (in the book) as snobbish as the regular people who spurned them. I’m hanging on to those books.
A brief note – I’ve been having real trouble getting comments to post from my desktop machine for some time (and have just emailed the Webmaster address about the issue). I’m now trying via mobile, and so can’t do a proper reply at length – for now, I’ll just point folks at the 186 comments in the original version of this post from last year.
With the Internet it’s far easier to find people who are into the more obscure stories out there. However, I often find that I prefer a well-known author’s lesser known works to their considered “masterpiece.” One of my favorite Shakespeare plays is Cymbeline, almost never performed or even discussed (though I have seen one live show!) Jupiter himself comes down from the heavens and visits one of the protagonists in jail to both convict him of his sins and help him get through his ordeal (which means it must qualify as fantasy, right?)
Everyone in school has to read The Scarlet Letter, but I know of few who’ve cracked Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables, in my opinion a superior novel that delivers SL’s message without being quite so heavy-handed. One of the characters is on the cutting edge of science (daguerreotype photography) and there’s a curse on the house and its family, which plays out in a brilliant breaking-the-fourth wall moment where the author (spoilers for a 150 book) first kills the villain then inserts himself into the narrative to both mock and berate him for an entire chapter.
But as to “true” genre stories, I’d recommend Star Surgeon by Alan E. Nourse. I found it through Librivox and it’s a great quirky little scifi adventure that I’m really surprised is so obscure. Maybe because the main characters are doctors, and there are no space battles? Nonetheless, the climax features a rousing race against time to discover a vaccine for a runaway virus on a planet, and the solution to their problem proves to be a lesson in empathy all around (and the narrator at Librivox is very good).
The Cats of Seroster, by Robert Westall, sparked a life-long love of sentient cat stories for me.
Le Guin’s Powers trilogy, Kage Baker, Nicholas Stuart Grey, Robert Westall: all wonderful and I too wish they were better known. But my favorite lesser-known books are Leslie Barringer’s Gerfalcon, a coming-of-age story in a slightly imaginary medieval France, and Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, about the reconciliation of a city of hardheaded merchants with Faerie.
Spaceling by Doris Piserchia is one of my very favourites. I still mourn the loss of my beloved hardcover with the purple goth creature on the cover.
Also Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls by Jane Linskold, though I’m much fonder of my paperback copy with the inaccurate plushie version of Betwixt and Between, Sarah’s two-headed dragon friend, than I am of the more recent reissue.
@24, there are two cat-centred novels I read as a young teen that the internet has failed so far to reconnect me with. I at least remember a partial title for the first, called “The Cats Plantagenet” or something similar about the adventures of the cats in the royal house of same.
The second novel was about a seaside English town that somehow broke off from the mainland and began floating around the world until it at last ended up wedged in the ice of the South Pole, whereupon the alley cat of the town who was by now the last resident, wandered into the tent of an Antarctic expedition, much to the astonishment of the explorers inside!
Alas, no matter how many keyword combinations I’ve tried, I’ve just had no success rediscovering these books.
The second would be ‘The Town That Went South’ (which I must have read 35-40 years ago). The title stuck, the plot not so much (though I remember the description of rain from the beginning).
From the same stage of my life, I remember really enjoying ‘Green Smoke’ by Rosemary Manning
Dragonworld by Byron Preiss and Michael Reeves was the first book that sprang into my mind when I read this, but then along came The Silver Sun (op art of a series by Nancy Springer) and A Mirror For Princes, a grimdark alt history in the vein of Guy Gavriel Kay, by Tom de Haan.
I also remember Green Knowe, Green Smoke and The Cats of Seroster fondly. I loved the writing in Hounds of the Morrigan – perfect for reading aloud.
@28. You’re right! I finally found success on Google at rather about the same time you posted your comment! The author is Clive King, who also wrote ‘Stig Of The Dump` (which ironically is a title I remember also reading at the same age). Amazingly, ‘The Town That Went South` is still in print.
@29. Wow I also immediately thought of Nancy Springer upon reading the article. The series you refer to is “The Books of Isle”, originally a trilogy that was expanded to five books in total, beginning with ‘The White Hart’ and ending with ‘The Golden Swan’. I found these books in my local opportunity shop some years ago and bought them on a whim, having never heard of Nancy Springer before. After finally reading them last year and enjoying them immensely, I remain mystified as to why she remains relatively unknown in the high fantasy genre.
I’ve been a longtime collector of Thomas Burnett Swann’s books, and since practically everything he published has been out of print since his death in 1976, I find few people today who’ve heard of him.
31: I reread and reviewed Lady of Bees not so long ago….
I have two books by Andrew M. Stephenson (The Night Watch, Wall of Years) that I remember fondly but since AMS stopped writing novels 43 years ago, few other people know of them.
My fandom of one is for The Stray by Betsy James Wyeth and illustrated by Jamie Wyeth. It’s long out of print and I’ve bought multiple copies to give to friends when I find one used for not too dear a price.
Oh, yes, and also all of Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s Keltiad books, which I found to be a fascinating take on Arthurian tales. I only wish she’d been able to write the many others apparently envisioned by the one time line I once saw. Love all the ones I’ve read, and own lovely hardcovers of several. Be nice if I could get them as ebooks so I could easily read them with normal font now beyond my abilities, though.
Some old favourites mentioned both in the post and the comments, I’ll have to dust off some old buddies shortly for some hammock reading. A hearty second for Witchdame – I LOVE that book, you’re not alone! Thanks all, for bringing back some great memories of amazing books.
I’ll add: Heather Gladney’s Teot books to this group, and Zahra Greenhalgh’s Tricksters too!
Imajica – Clive Barker
I’m sure tons of people out there have read it, but whenever I’m talking books IRL with people no one seems to know of this one.
I’d like to add Steven Gould to the list. I’m sure he’s not all that obscure, since he’s published 10-ish books, but I rarely see him mentioned anywhere. The Jumper series is great, but so are the standalones like _Wildside_ and _Helm_.
@37 I have read Imajica, not long ago in fact, and found it – amazing.
My own “unknown” favorite it The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Eddison. LOVE that book.
The Leslie Barringer The Neustrian Cycle: The Gerfalcon; Joris of the Rock; The Shy Leopardess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Barringer
Chime! Yes! One of my absolute favorites.
Some other more obscure favorites are Melina Marchetta’s novels, Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt, and The Farthest Away Mountain by Lynne Reid Banks.
The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge remains one of my very very favorite childhood books, but no one has ever heard of it. The title is misleading — the white horse (implied at points to be a unicorn) plays a small role. The characters are so vivid, even upon rereading as an adult. I remember staying up all night reading it at my aunt’s house, totally bewitched by the story and compelled to finish it. I have found some articles on the internet about it but I hope one day to meet someone for whom it enthralled them as much as it did me.
Oh, the Hollow Kingdom series by Clare B. Dunkle too! The first is my favorite and remains very close to my heart.
@42 Goudge is great, if dated, in general; several of her books have fantasy elements.
Circus World by Barry Longyear and The Sunbird by Wilbur Smith (the only Smith book I ever liked.)
Monument by Ian Graham; It’s like no one hear of it but it was a great grimdark fantasy before fantasy was a thing. The cover didn’t do it any favors, so maybe that’s part of it.
To Ride Hell’s Chasm by Janny Wurts My favorite stand-alone of all time, I think it was victim of being released about when 9/11 occurred.
Anything by J V Jones, but most all her Sword of Shadows series. I feel like she was up and coming and then she dropped off the radar.. but she hasn’t done herself any favors. She may be worse than GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss in getting finishing this series.
@23 : I have read that though it’s been quite a long time. I think there is a Tor contributor who has worked through a lot of Alan Nourse’s work. I remember finding it as a tween or teen in the sadly small SF/Fantasy section at the library. I believe it was along with The Girl with Violet Eyes, and a few others in that range.
Additional upvotes for Kage Baker and Jane Yolen. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read them, but I remember them and enjoyed them.
I’m sure there’s some novels in the downstairs library that are less mentioned, but one I know I’ve not heard of much is a collection of SF short stories edited by Asimov and Jeppeson called _Laughing Space_. It is seriously quite funny, and has some of the best shaggy dog shorts I’ve ever read. If you ever find that one, give it a spin.
@19
Yeah, I remember that one, I haven’t thought about it ages, except a couple scraps about color vision and camouflage.
There’s a book I spent several years looking for called The Magician’s Apprentice (there are so very many books called that…) by David someone IIRC, about a street urchin who tries to rob a magician and becomes his apprentice. Then talking rats with poison dart blowguns show up and things get a bit odd.
I think Sharyn McCrumb is still fairly popular, but hardly anyone has heard of Bimbos of the Death Sun. (which is not technically SFF, it’s a perfectly mundane murder mystery, but it takes place at a sci-fi con, so it’s very much SFF adjacent).
I’ve still got my old copy of Raymond Feist’s Faerie Tale, a modern (as of the late 80s when it came out) horror take on the fae returning to menace a family who picked the wrong house to move into to get away from it all, quite different to his epic blood-and-thunder secondary world fantasy that gets talked about a lot more.
Cherishing my copy of Lud-in-the-Mist.
also Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright, and The Chairwoman’s Shadow, by Lord Dunsany.
Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel trilogy & Lian Hearne’s Tales of the Otori are two that I regret no longer having in my possession and don’t meet/talk to many (any?) folks who have read them. Patricia Mckillip’s Riddlemaster of Hed I’ve still got my worn paperbacks from youth and they never disappoint. Michelle Sagara West’s The Sundered I came to later in life but cherish all the same. great topic and comments, this is why I love being part of the Tor community!!
oh and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards (aka actress Julie Andrews!). loved this one so much as a kid the cover is falling off my copy :)
I’m always intrigued by which of an author’s books get the glory and which fly under the radar, even for people who’ve read their big-name titles. Things like Chalice by Robin McKinley or The Wild Hunt by Jane Yolen have had more impact on me than the big ones from those authors; some lesser-received Avi (Jade Green, Wolf Rider) and Susan Cooper (The Boggart. Oh, The Boggart!!); and Lackey’s Fairy Tales books, rather than Valdemar.
The Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming duology by Sienna Tristan absolutely floored me. I was completely engrossed, but almost no one I know has heard of them, much less read them.
I have mentioned it here before, but one book that seems almost unknown, but which struck me hard when I read it, is The Forest of App by Gloria Rand Dank, a novel for younger readers about an enchanted forest that is slowly losing its magic. A second one is Miranty and the Alchemist by Vera Chapman, a historical fantasy set in Elizabethan times. I still have my battered copy of The Forest of App, which I bought used some thirty years ago, but it has been nearly that long since I have seen Miranty and the Alchemist.
I learned of The Hounds of the Morrigan from a review in Dragon Magazine, back in the ’80s. A few years later, I acquired a hardcover copy, but unfortunately never read it; it got boxed up, and, many years later, donated to a used bookstore when I had to whittle down my book collection, in part because the hardcover addition was large and difficult to pack up. I should track down another copy and try again.
I have read and remember quite a few of the books people listed above, including The Book of Three (and the rest of the Chronicles of Prydain), Over Sea, Under Stone (and the rest of The Dark Is Rising), Sister Light, Sister Dark, Lud-in-the-Mist, Tales of the Otori, Dragonworld (another for which I still have my much-battered original copy), Darkangel (ditto), and some of Rosemary Suttcliffe’s works. I have read The Copper Crown (the first book in Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s Keltiad), but not the remainder of the series, and I began The Riddle-Master of Hed, but did not finish it; that may be another work for me to tackle again sometime. I have heard of The Little White Horse, but I have not read it, although I have seen the film The Secret of Moonacre, which was (loosely) based on it.
I read Geraldine Harris’s Last Prince of the Godborn series long years ago, returned to my hometown and discovered they weren’t in the library anymore – not enough readers. I’ve still never met anyone who’s read them, but I loved them as a teen. They are available in e-reader editions, so I own them now.
Also, big agree on Kage Baker and Melina Marchetta! Excellent authors both, and seemingly so obscure.
@51 Yes to Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles! Such a charming book, but aside from my siblings and I, I’ve never met anyone else who read it!
@55: I have seen Geraldine Harris’ Last Prince of the Godborn series recommended online by multiple people recently (the first being the author Marie Brennan, who wrote about the series on her blog back in January, after re-reading the books). I read a sample of the first book online, and have definitely added them to my TBR list.
@38: I think Wildside should be filmed by somebody who understands that the point is not oooh aaaah big animals and spectacle, but coming of age in two vast, unpredictable, and bewildering worlds at the same time. I love that book. I liked Jumper better as a standalone and I wish it had been filmed as written. The protagonist is a completely believable smart, traumatized, and lonely teenage boy with superpowers.
I don’t know, Prydain was always easy enough to find people who had read those – the trick was to find anyone else who’d read Westmark and especially The Kestrel which I remember as a pretty harrowing take on the cost of war.
Speaking of Prydain, I’ve thought for awhile that some of those beloved older children’s series would really benefit from being re-released in collected editions. People of a Certain Age who loved them as kids (me) could probably be suckered into buying a snazzy hardcover of them all put together. I think Narnia (and LotR of course) are the only ones I’ve seen this done for.
oh man, the Keltiad. I’d forgotten all about those! Nice reminder of some good stuff from my heavy reading era.
All right, let’s see if the posting buttons will let me in tonight….
#55: You have now made my day; as it happens, I wrote that review of Hounds of the Morrigan back in the ’80s. I recall being particularly drawn to the cover – and I was also somewhat familiar with the publisher, because one of its regular authors was among my favorites when I was growing up. Which I suppose is actually relevant here – that other author was T. Ernesto Bethancourt, whose extensive portfolio includes straight-up fantasy (The Dog Days of Arthur Cane), mystery/adventure (the Doris Fein series, featuring a plus-sized girl sleuth), and science fiction (a time-travel sequence beginning with Tune In Yesterday). “Bethancourt” is a pen name, as the author is (or was; Google is coming up curiously thin on results) also known as musician and singer Tom Paisley.
Barrington J Bayley The Garments of Caean.
“The Still Small Voice of Trumpets” by Lloyd Biggle. It’s a classic Analog-type “problem solving” story, where visitors to a planet that may be up for membership in a galactic federation are allowed by their version of the “prime directive” to introduce only one technologica/cultural advancement that must only utilize existing technology on the planet. I was deeply satisfied in the way the story took its contrived premise and played it out plausibly, through some impressive world-building and culture-building.
David Feintuch and the Seafort series. He died over a dozen years ago, leaving an unfinished book but there are seven gutbustingly dramatic books, kind of like Master and Commander in space. No online community presence that I’ve seen and I feel like I hold the only torch for these books.
@scoutee #51 & @SeventeenHarebell #55:
I read The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles as an adult, but got hung up on the part where a kid meets a weird old guy in the park and goes home with him. I much preferred Andrews/Edwards’ other book, Mandy, about a little orphan girl who finds an abandoned cottage and starts taking care of it. Of course, it wasn’t much more realistic than the Whangdoodle book. J
My book that no one else ever read: The Wily Witch, by Godfried Bomans. Fairy tales, but a little darker and more “off” than most. It has beautiful illustrations as well, including a picture of an executioner after a beheading, and one of a man taking a crap in a field.
@58 WESTMARK! YES. Those were always my favorite – they grabbed me in a way Prydain never did.
@55 and @56 – I read the Geraldine Harris tetralogy after seeing Brennan’s comment on it, and… I was kind of disappointed. It definitely had interesting bits but a)a lot of it would have seemed to be deliberately trying to tick off entries in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland had it not been published earlier than that, and b)I did not care for the ending.
In fairness, I would probably have liked it a lot more had I read it when it was first published, when I was 13-14. (And in fairness to Brennan, I think her comment was more about how surprised she was at the ending, rather than a recommendation as such.)
@58: Thank you for mentioning Westmark! I read Westmark and The Kestrel in high school, and The Beggar Queen not long after.
@59: I’m thrilled to have made your day; when I mentioned that book review, I never expected to hear from the person who wrote it! While I only played D&D for a short time, I loved reading the campaign settings and other game materials, and I continued reading Dragon magazine throughout my teens, including the regular book review column, “The Role of Books.” It seems bizarre now looking back as an adult, but while I read all the book reviews, and found a number of books that interested me, such as The Hounds of the Morrigan, I rarely if ever tried to seek them out at the time. Admittedly, this was before the days of Amazon, or the Web in general, but I’m surprised I didn’t make more of an effort to find them at the library or elsewhere. On the other, hand, I did succeed in tracking down some of the titles I remembered and finally read them years later.
Ironically, there is one book I remember reading a review of in Dragon that I would like to find now, but I cannot remember either the title or the author. I only remember that that the setting involved humans living in the remains of an insectoid civilization, and that one of the characters was compared to a Japanese samurai. (If anyone has any guesses as to what the novel in question might be, I would be grateful.)
@66
Not offhand, but I have a digital archive of Dragon Magazine, if you can remember the year I might be able to find the review in question.
#66/67: There is also an index here of every book review published in Dragon (I was not the first or only reviewer, though I had the chair for the longest consecutive run). Unfortunately, it’s sorted by book title and author. Also unfortunately – and ironically – I was never sent a copy of the official Dragon archive CD (there’s a story there, but this isn’t the time or place for it).
I had also been going to say that the plot summary in #66 entirely failed to ring a bell, but having spent a few minutes just now scrolling down through the review index, I have a prospect for you: I think you may be looking for the Janny Wurts / Raymond Feist novels beginning with Daughter of the Empire. Those have insectoids, a human protagonist, and significant resonances with Japanese social culture, including the samurai tradition.
@68
Oh wow, that list is bringing back memories. (It includes every book I mentioned upthread too). Having skimmed the list myself, I think Daughter of the Empire is a pretty good bet; I haven’t read everything on the list, but most of it, and nothing else I recognized matched even a little bit.
In the early 80’s, I was handed a stack of old SF paperbacks from a family friend who was shipping out in the Navy. Lots of well known, great books in that pile were a revelation to me – Hitchhikers Guide series, Fredrick Pohl’s Star series SF anthologies, and others. But one of my favorites that I never hear much about was ‘The Witches of Karres”, an entertaining mashup up of space opera, picaresque and magic. It had a lot of charm and is a fun read every time I pick it up.
Although _Witchdame_ compellingly written, I still preferred the Don Maitz cover to the book. Janny Wurts has painted many wonderful covers for her books over the years.
At the 1994 World Fantasy Convention, Heather Gladney’s _Teot_ books had just come out. Andre Norton was recommending them so enthusiastically, that soft-spoken lady was downright effusive.
The author I always pick up whenever spotted is Robert M. Arthur. In addition to creating _The Three Investigators_ series and writing the initial 7 novels therein, he also had numerous stories in Alfred Hitchcock anthologies back in the day. The two collections of his own short stories are tricky to find, even for a lifetime thing-finder.
So many of the names mentioned in the comments: Rosemary Sutcliff, Lloyd Alexander, LM Boston, Elizabeth Goudge, etc. are common parlance in the internet spaces I frequent, such as the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list and Megan Whalen Turner fandom. It’s discombobulating to see them discussed as rarities, when I’ve experienced them as the delights of every day.
Two of my favorites are Silverlock by John Meyers Meyers and The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford. And then there is The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, which is… fraught.
I just found my Three Investigators books in a box in the attic, The Witches of Karres was in that box too, and The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes; I no longer feel like a Lonely Only.
It’s a delight to see everyone else’s choices. I am so happy to have new old titles to explore!