I loved that book! Was he the same author that wrote Peter Graves, also?
Hmm, children’s books to add to the list…most of them courtesy of Scholastic Book Services…
a) Alexander Key’s The Forgotten Door. Great science fiction from the author of Escape to Witch Mountain.
b) Mickie Davidson’s Helen Keller’s Teacher. The Miracle Worker story but with a lot more back-story on Annie Sullivan, her childhood etc, and very well written.
c) Mary Nickerson Wallace’s The Ghost of Dibble Hollow. Cute entertaining ghost story.
d) Eleanor Clymer’s Search for a Living Fossil. The coelacanth discovery story.
e) J. Allan Bosworth’s All the Dark Places. Nailbiter about going caving (spelunking)
< waves hand > I have, and his other book Threshold, also good even if it was written like the start of a series.
Some older obscure books I like :
Traveller in Black by John Brunner, about a “quiet man dressed in black who carries a staff made of light” who has “many names but one nature”, and whose job is to drive back Chaos.
God Stalk,by PC Hodgell, about a monotheist outcast girl with amnesia who ends up in a city with thousands of gods.
The Seven Towers by Patricia Wrede; her first book I think.
**Lost Men Of American History ** by Stuart Holbrook. If you want to learn about the American who build a working submarine during the Revolutionary War, or the man in New England who was persecuted for wearing a beard, or …
I’d recommend any of HG well’s books-how about “THE ISLAND of Dr. Moreau”? Remarkably prescient-written about a scientist making bizarre anim,als, long before DNA was known. Or: "men Like Gods’-a good read.
Wells is writing from the perspective of a mid-Victorian, long before the modern scientific age-which is a unique view of the world.
Mick Farren’s The Texts of Festival – a post-apocalypse Old West culture with religion based on late-1950s rock music. There’s a tribe of barbarian raiders on motorcycles, too!
Ringstones by Sarban – a subtle but weirdly engrossing Brit-style horror novel about evil faeries
Seance On A Wet Afternoon it’s either a crime novel or a ghost story, either way it’s gritty and suspenseful and you believe every word of it.
Some of these books aren’t “forgotten” by any means, but I’ll allow that they’re not as well known as they ought to be. I realize that I might make some of the same errors, but:
I’d add his Bladerunner, which has nothing to do with the Ridley Scott film (except that in the end credits they thanked Nourse for letting them use the title). Excellent medical science fiction that takes a chilling but plausible little idea and extrapolates it to its logical conclusion.
Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown. Until about 15 years ago you could count on someone reprinting one Fredric Brown mystery a year, but i never see them anymore. I knew Brown as a science fiction and fantasy author, but Martin Gardner’s mention of this in his Annotated Alice made me seek it out, and it’s worth it. So are his other mysteries, if you can find them anymore. Also highly recommended is The Fabulous Clipjoint, which got him an Edgar. Crispin Magicker by Mark M. Lowenthal – Interesting fantasy novel. I’ve only ever seen one copy of it, which I own. I’ve never even encounterede anyone who read it (aside from the guy I bought it from), but I’ll bet that’ll change now.
The Snouters – a German book on the evolution of large-nosed rodent-like creatures that have, like Darwin’s Galapagos finches, evolved to fill all niches on their island. It’s been translated into English, and I got my copy at the American Museum of Natural History:
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Mick Farren’s The Texts of Festival – a post-apocalypse Old West culture with religion based on late-1950s rock music. There’s a tribe of barbarian raiders on motorcycles, too!
1960s, I meant to say. :smack: :smack: :smack: One damned typo can bugger-up the whole meaning of a sentence from Hell to breakfast.
el deluxo – who was a mere guest and could not self-edit.
The Golden Kazoo by John C. Schneider. Hilarious, Catch-22-like novel about a presidential campaign, where the candidate doesn’t matter and everything he does is scripted and, essentially, he is sold like laundry detergent.
The kicker is that the book came out in 1956, a dozen years before The Selling of the President and clearly foresaw the direction in which political campaigns were going (it was written even before Eisenhower’s successful ad-oriented campaign that year). It was also set in 1960 (or 1964 in a revised edition), making it one of the few science fiction novels whose predictions were accurate (it even postulated a supercomputer).
Apparently, my book is a little too obscure; I couldn’t find much of a link (at least not in English). Here it is at Amazon, sans image or review. It’s called The Wily Witch, and All the Other Fairy Tales and Fables, by Godfried Bomans.
This is a children’s book of fairy tales, yes, but unlike any other I’ve read. The stories are wry, ironic, humorous, some gory, some with meanings I couldn’t understand when I read them as a child. The illustrations…the only word that fits is exquisite.
Like Auntie Pam, I’m not much of a book describer, but I would say that of all the books I have read in my lifetime, this has been a consistent favorite. In fact, I have just decided to buy copies for all the kids on my Christmas list this year.
Half-Magic by Edward Eager, which I now find out is a children’s classic. I pulled off the library shelf when I was 8 or 9 and my grandmother ended up paying for it because I kept it for months reading it over and over and over again.
Then there was this book that I think is very well known, but I do not remember the name. It’s about a boy who runs away to the woods. He boils water in a leaf and does all sorts of things to survive. When I was a child reading this book, I thought it was non-fiction but now I’m not so sure.
Lastly, I read this book when I was a little older-- Dibs, In Search of Self. I may have been in Junior High and it was then I decided I wanted to be a child psycologist. Which I never did become, btw. Still, the book stuck with me for years.
The Pearl, Steinbeck. A timeless tale dealing with the problems of suddenly acquiring wealth, dealing with greed and disruption of family. Nice short read, about 100 pages.
Not all that old - 1956, so 51 years - but I will nominate The Last Hurrah, by Edwin O’Connor. A delightful, insightful book on old-school, big-time politics - just a wonderful story with richly-drawn characters…
