Oh, how I envy you! To be reading the Wimsey novels for the first time!
As_u_wish, Pinkfreud, Lurkmeister, and Equipoise, when you get through The Wimsey Family, start a thread and we can compare notes!
I have it, but still haven’t read it.
Equipoise – I’ve read both those books. Cordwainer Smith’s works are finally out in paperback in a mas-market edition now, which is a good thing, but if you want the more-than-complete Smith, you need to get The Complete Short Stories of Cordwainer Smith, the critical edition of Norstrilia , and The Cordwainer Smith Concordance, all from NESFA Press. It’s by far the most complete edition of his works (with revised versions, and stories you won’t find in any other edition), and the Concordance tells you the history behind the names in his works.
Lots of folks on this Board have read Smith’s books, though – they’re not nearly as obscure as the other things on this board.
One other obscure book I have to mention – the only cop of it I’ve ever seen is the one I have. It’s End Product: The Last Taboo It’s a book about, well, poop. There have been other books on the topic in recent years, but this one’s well-researched and footnoted.
I think I have mentioned How To Shit In The Woods in a recent thread, but here it is again…
Roger that. I actually own two copies of this book.
IIRC, they flip for him. He doesn’t get them both.
This is a fascinating book. It parallels the history of human civilization with the history of one of the key technologies that made concentrated human habitation possible: the management of human waste.
Piffle. I read that when it was serialized in The Last Whole Earth Catalog.
I’ve read Barrabas, too.
Hazle Weatherfield, my son loved the Whangdoodles, but I never realized it was THAT Julie Andrews (Edwards)! :eek: The Teddy Bear Habit was oft’ recommended to us, but for some reason I never picked it up.
My nominee is Shield of Three Lions by Pamela Kaufman. No one seems to know this one, but when I was a tween into the whole “girl disguises herself as a boy to go have adventures” genre, this one brought me up short with both it’s realism (rather detailed descriptions of how to construct a false prick out of willow) and it’s fantasy (young girl disguised as boy catches the eye of King Richard and is dragged along on Crusade with him; adventures ensue). It was the first book I read that had significant sections written in dialect, and lots and lots of period specific terms and details which I found (find) fascinating. Warning: while marketed as a YA book, it does contain graphic descriptions of rape, childbirth gone awry and other medieval horrors, including recitations of foodstuffs to turn the stomach of modern man.
This sounds awesome.
Lord of the Barnyard, by Tristan Egolf
I’ve never heard it mentioned by anyone but the people I’ve recommended it to. It’s an amazing book. I can’t say enough good things about it.
Meurglys and CalMeacham, thank you for the info about Cordwainer Smith’s books!
I think we ran into each other about this one in some other thread - I picked it up in an academic library (Duke, weirdly) at nerd camp as a kid. I ought to go back and reread them - I have really vivid memories.
Shards of God by Ed Sanders Written i think in about 1960.
**Pier Head Jump ** by Don Pearce, who also wrote Cool Hand Luke. A strange, fascinating description of what happens when the crew of a freighter bound for Vietnam finds a Japanese sex doll afloat in the Atlantic and rescues it.
Well, someone may have read this one, but I’ll give it a go anyway: “Budapest” by Chico Buarque. From the Amazon review:
In lyrical prose, Buarque limns the psychology of a Brazilian ghostwriter who, while working for a Rio agency as a speechwriter, attends a writers’ conference abroad and finds himself waylaid in Budapest. During his forced stopover in the Hungarian capital, the local language assaults, stimulates, and intrigues him–Hungarian being “the only language in the world that the devil respects”–and he must learn it fluently. What his pursuit has to do with a young lady he meets in Budapest and how his obsession with gaining fluency in this foreign tongue affects his life with his disrespectful wife back in Rio are the heart of this thoughtful and even exciting novel, which is underscored, first, by the main character’s conviction that “there is no life outside Hungary” and, second, by the author’s exploration of language as one’s primary sense of personal identity.
Count me as another person who’s read this one. Didn’t much like it, though. I felt it was too self-consciously trying to evoke Catch-22.
My recommendation: The Man Who Wrote the Book, by Eric Tarloff, a book about a failing lit professor who writes a pornographic novel to pick up some extra cash, only to have it become a surprise bestseller. I thought this book was hysterical, and made it one of my staff picks when I worked at a bookstore. No one EVER bought it, probably because a paperback edition never came out. (Maybe one’s out now, this was back in 2001.) It was a NY Times notable book of the year in 2000, but I think the reviewer and I are the only two people who ever read it.
I just checked. They roll to see which one gets to go into space with him. But before that it’s implied that all three were “together” on the trek back to the girl’s home village.
I thoroughly the series of books by Lawrence Durrell known as the Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthasar,Clea, Mountolive), but the only other person I know who read any of them read just a bit as a class assignment. I also enjoyed Tunc & Nunqum by Durrell.
By the Way - What a wonderful thread! I’ve only read a few of the ones mentioned (Master of Hestviken; The Carpet Makers), so I hoping discover some new ones!
Another fan of Bride of the Rat God here. 
I’ll contribute Jerusalem Fire, by R. M. Meluch. (The only other of her books that I’ve read, Sovereign, gets a solid “meh”… but for some reason I found the ideas in Jerusalem Fire oddly compelling).
I loved it. But I’m a Wonderland fanboy, so it’s right in my wheelhouse.
Another one I really liked was Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez Pinol. It’s a recent novel translated from Spanish a couple of years ago.
It’s set on a sub-Antarctic island in the 1920s, iirc, where a relief weather observer is put ashore and finds no trace of the man he’s replacing. But there’s a madman in the adjacent lighthouse and he discovers that strange things slither ashore at night… and the ship isn’t due back for a year!
If so many people read the darn thing, howcome Hambly didn’t write that promised sequel? Or put out a hardcover edition? :dubious: :mad: 