Play Book Tag discussion

Have a book you’ve read that you wish more people knew about? Perhaps it’s a book with under 500 ratings you wish more readers would pick up. Is there an author you found and love and were surprised more readers haven’t read their books?

Next year I am challenging myself to read outside the popular box and would love your suggestions.

Wow! Great question and great challenge. I'll get back to you.

Fantastic idea. I'll give it some thought.

I've found some. It's all nonfiction.

War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival

Great Feuds in History: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever

'78: The Boston Red Sox, A Historic Game, and a Divided City

Crucible of Terror: A Story of Survival Through the Nazi Storm

Everything else I would recommend is either Presidential Biographies or is religious.

I added the books you recommended to my TBR. Thank you Jason!

Looking at the books I’m surprised at how few reviews and ratings there are.

Looking forward to seeing your ideas Theresa.

I would like to suggest a book by the British author Susan Fletcher, "Let Me Tell You about a Man I Knew" (perhaps not the best title). It's about Vincent VanGogh's stay in a mental facility in the South of France. Beautifully written. There are 735 ratings on Goodreads. I would also like to recommend anything by the Irish author William Trevor; his novels are often short but quite tense. Beautifully written as only the Irish can do.

Thank you Margot! Is there a book you recommend by William Trevor to start with?

Yes, I could recommend "Reading Turgenev". 514 ratings on Goodreads. It's about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage.

Added it.

I recommend:
Nature Tales for Winter Nights by Nancy Campbell

It is a wonderfully curated anthology of both fiction and non-fiction that feature the beauty of nature, particularly the landscapes of winter in the northern hemisphere. It is a meditative read. I read them one at a time right before sleep.

I have a few that I would put on my list
Kia Corthron's Moon and the Mars(420) & The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter
The Investigation by Jung-myung Lee(2,017)
The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, The Gladyses, & Babe(1,144)
After Story(5,059)
Briefly, A Delicious Life(9,112)
Consider This, Señora(994 )

I've a few for you, all sorts of genres - this actually was a fun exercise - I added 'num ratings' to my settings for my Read shelf, then started at lowest. Many of those with extremely low number of ratings that I really liked are for older books (fiction expecially) or non-fiction.

The Lost Love Letters of Henri Fournier and Becoming George Sand, both by Rosalind Brackenbury - both deal with real authors, real history of those authors, and real letters and published works of those authors but within a fictional frame.

Death in Saratoga Springs by Charles O'Brien - part of an historical mystery series set in the Gilded Age - this is the 2nd in the series and involves veterans of the Civil War.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Baxter - might have been published in the 1950s but still reflects the essentials of Christmas in NYC even today.

Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson - one of the most original, creative, even eccentric mystery writers from end of 20th Century. At its heart, this is an isolated country house murder mystery within a fantastical even scifi story.

Improbable Patriot: The Secret History of Monsieur de Beaumarchais, the French Playwright Who Saved the American Revolution

Dead Now Of Course - Phyllida Law's memoir of her start in British theater - - she's one of UK's great actresses and mother of Emma Thompson.

Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries - Antony Sher kept a journal of the year he spent preparing and rehearsing to perform Shakespeare's Falstaff in an acclaimed production.

Love, Death & Rare Books by Robert Hellenga - a favorite author's final book. I also recommend The Sixteen Pleasures

Deadly Safari by Karin McQuillan - one of the most atmospheric murder mysteries I've ever read - first in series and I recommend them all. In this one, you taste, smell, and experience the safari and Africa as you read.

One more:

Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr - written by his son John. 5 stars from me. Service not just as a biography of Lahr, but also of the theater and early days of movies.

I like the idea. My list has several books that were best sellers on publication, several were made into movies, but they are mostly forgotten now:

A Summer Place by Sloan Wilson (535)
High Road To China by Jon Cleary (179)
Some Came Running by James Jones (363)
Bhowani Junction by John Masters (470)
The Dark of Summer by Eric Linklater (47)
Seven Men of Gascony by R. F. Delderfield (227)
Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernandez (398)
The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Sheppard (447)
The White South by Hammond Innes (292)
The Bridges by Tarjei Vesaas (205)
The Boat in the Evening by Tarjei Vesaas (337)
The Visitors by Simon Sylvester (899)
So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo (357)
Midnight Sun: The Complete Stories of Kane by Karl Edward Wagner (347)

I have added everything up to here.

So far, the most obscure book is The White South. I think visiting Abebooks might be in order as it’s not available on kindle or Amazon!

I love these kinds of books. Treasure hunt in progress at used bookstores.

So far I have 39 recommendations on the list.

This year I read

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread - found at a yard sale 4 stars

And also The Girl in Green on a recommendation from BooknBlues 5 stars

Margaret wrote: "I have added everything up to here.

So far, the most obscure book is The White South. I think visiting Abebooks might be in order as it’s not available on kindle or Amazon!

I lov..."

Hammond Innes was one of the most popular thriller writers in England in the 1950s-1960s. You can pick any other of his book if this one is hard to find, but avoid his later novels from the seventies. I think the first one by him that I borrowed from the British Council Library was The Lonely Skier

Added up to here.

I loved the movie High Road To China. That was the only title I recognized.

Margaret wrote: "Added up to here.

I loved the movie High Road To China. That was the only title I recognized."

I searched for the book after watching the movie. Some of these authors from previous generations benefit from the ebook publishing boom and e-ink readers. I was going to add Jules et Jim, a novel I spent at least a couple of decades trying to find, but it can hardly be called obscure

I actually have on my phone a list of authors/books to check when I find a used bookstore in my travels. I find it really helps me not experience sensory overload when walking into the store, and by looking for a couple of specific books, get a sense of the order of the store.

As Algernon says, some of these older authors are benefiting from ebook publishing. There are certain publishers that look for genre authors of series seeking permission to print in ebook. Also not so old authors who have been dropped by their publishers have turned to self-publishing new books and re-launching the backlist. I've spotted some of these popping up on Kindle Unlimited which is one of the reasons I stay subscribed to it even if I'm not reading from their listings regularly.

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens was delightful, moody, and unconventional. I don’t think it’s necessary to love Chopin to enjoy the book, but it gave me some big wow moments.

One of my recent favorites was a memoir - Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. It combines several topics that I find interesting, and was unlike anything I’ve seen in novels, She had some interesting insights about China, cross cultural communication, and a major life change.

Margaret, I forgot about the book I am presently readingV13: Chronicle of a Trial - very heart-wrenching, but a great writer makes me pick it up every night for small doses.

I have a shelf just for this, although it's no longer complete.

But for those that have less than 500 ratings:

Wishing You Were Here by Catherine Chant is as good as a good tradtionally published novel, but time travel romance to the 1950s doesn't sell to the y/a crowd.

Skipper Worse by Alexander L. Kielland is a Norwegian classic

I've already mentioned this elsewhere, but
Where Nests the Water Hen Canadian literary fiction

Okay, I'm cheating with this one since there are more than 1000 ratings but I missed it in my Canadian book recommendations AND she was the first Canadian literary author to be recognized as Canada finally started to get over this colony idea that no good literary authors could come from Canada.

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price

My Lord, What a Morning by Marian Anderson
Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson

Are there any Dalkey Archive Press readers here?

I plan next year to read

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young ( Amazon is currently out of stock but I’ve put in an order once it’s back in to deliver ASAP)

Thank you all for your recomendations. Excited to branch out and read harder next year.

Under the Radar Books wrote: "Are there any Dalkey Archive Press readers here?

I plan next year to read

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

The Planetarium by Nathal..."</i>

I met [author:Nathalie Sarraute in 1971! I was studying in Paris at a small school and for some reason she visited and I got to be one of the students chosen to have lunch with her. I don’t remember anything about it though. I was an undergrad and I don’t think I had read any of her books yet.

I give talks every couple of months on historic women, mostly American. The nonfiction books about them are little read - under 500 reviews, even under 100:

Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe
Side Saddle on a Comet’s Tail: The Life of Frances Dana Gage
The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer
Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist
Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener
Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall
A Dirty, Filthy Book: Annie Besant versus the Victorians, 1877-1888

You can tell I never speak about well-behaved women!

Other books

North of Hope and other novels by Jon Hassler
Laurentian Divide and other novels by Sarah Stonich
Virgins and Girls Forever Brave and True by Caryl Rivers
Luna. (Maybe known by our Canadian members)
The Testament of Yves Gundron
The Nesting Dolls and My Mother's Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region by Alina Adams, who some of us heard on Zoom a few years ago
The Hills at Home: A Novel
One Thousand Chestnut Trees: a Novel of Korea
Century in Scarlet - historical novel set in Hungary

Thank you for the recommendations Robin.

Nathalie Sarraute is another “ new to me” author. Late at night I somehow went down a rabbit hole on Goodreads searching for books to read and ended up searching Dalkey Archive Press books, reading reviews, and thinking I really need to expand my reading horizons.

Her book is arriving 5 December along with Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

Oh! That’s another rabbit hole I went down. By the end I found myself adding books about Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Wittgenstein’s Nephew ( the mistress and nephew are not related to Ludwig. A rather nice family unit though of titles).

Robin P wrote: "I give talks every couple of months on historic women, mostly American. The nonfiction books about them are little read - under 500 reviews, even under 100:

[book:Diva Julia: The Public Romance an..."

These all intrigue me Robin. I am going to have to see which I can find.

The Archipelago of Another Life - 1070 ratings
Shark Dialogues -2994 ratings

And for something completely different:
The Flavors of Iraq: Impressions of My Vanished Homeland - this one is a combination of llustrations and tweets - but I loved how he used the tweets to present his encounters and feelings about his homeland Irak - 96 ratings

PS: fully endorse The Investigation by Jung-myung Lee

I recommend The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, a coming-of-age novel and a great grandfather-grandson book.

The X-Craft Raid by Thomas Gallagher. - nonfiction about a WWII British submarine mission that had this typically non-war/non-military girlie absolutely riveted.


The Anointed by Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi. - a Kabbalistic novel about spiritual resistance during the Spanish Inquisition.


The Colors of April: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later edited by Quan Manh Ha. - a beautiful collection of short stories ranging from the family dynamics of split generations to cultural mythologies and everything in between.


Five Against the Sea by Ron Arias. - non-fiction survivalist story about a fishing expedition that becomes life-or-death when the boat becomes disabled and blown off-course in the Pacific Ocean.


The Peaceable Kingdom: A Year In the Life of America's Oldest Zoo by John Sedgwick. - This will be a good one for your used bookstore hunts since it's out of print; I've been clinging to my battered up copy from college for literal decades at this point. A lot of it may be outdated since this was written in 1988 but if you love animals and how the animal and human world comes together, this is a good one.

Here are some of the books I've really enjoyed that have relatively few ratings on GR. (All under 300 ratings, and all rated at least 4 stars by me.)

María, Daughter of Immigrants by Maria Antonietta Berriozabal (12 ratings)

The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave by Miguel Barnet (28 ratings)

West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement by Char Miller (33 ratings)

The Love Queen of the Amazon by Cecile Pineda (49 ratings)

Up Your Banners: A Comedy of Controversy by Donald E. Westlake (55 ratings)

The Baileys Harbor Bird and Booyah Club by Dave Crehore (55 ratings)

A Few Fair Days by Jane Gardam (58 ratings)

My Racing Heart: The Passionate World of Thoroughbreds and the Track by Nan Mooney (86 ratings)

With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba by Arnold Samuelson (102 ratings)

Mademoiselle Benoir by Christine Conrad (130 ratings)

The Ocean in the Closet by Yuko Taniguchi (140 ratings)

The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise Of Drug-Resistant Bacteria by Michael Shnayerson (151 ratings)

Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories by Jennifer Morales (213 ratings)

The Wedding Dress by Carrie Young (266 ratings)

Even in Paradise by Elizabeth Nunez (273 ratings)

Every Inch of Her by Peter Sheridan (290 ratings)


========================

Oh, and one more that I absolutely love and want more people to read. Though it already has 1,704 ratings ... it should have MORE. I rated it 5 stars.

Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell

I have that last one on my TBR, Tessa. Time to bump it up the list!

I’m going to be so busy reading all your recommendations next year! 🥰

Dalkey Archive Press is knew to me and I will be spending some time down that Rabbit Hole myself!

This also reminded me that there are a couple of publishers to recommend here:

https://persephonebooks.co.uk/ - Persephone Books specializes in publishing neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century. The books are high quality beautiful paperbacks. They tend to be found in indie bookstores on special racks and I accumulated quite a collection of them which I spent reading over 2 years via Unofficial Trim. One's I read and highly recommend - links are too the Persephone editions:
The Making of a Marchioness, Part I and II
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding


Another publisher is in US - Soho Press but specifically Soho Crime as it includes in its line of crime fiction English translations of both contemporary non-US authors, but also translations of classics such as those from the 2 Japanese Golden Age of Detective Fiction (1930s and 1960s), most being translated for the first time.

A third publisher of note is of course The New York Review of Books (NYRB) - often classics you know but also many that are little known. Again, these are quality paperback publications displayed on spinner racks in indie bookstores.

I have never heard of Soho Press. Any recommendations?

Your recommendations on publishers Theresa will keep me up for hours adding to my TBR. Onto the next rabbit hole!

Thank you again my fellow PBTers! Your recommendations are all wonderful.

I mostly read crime fiction from from the Soho Crime subdivision of Soho Press though that's not all they publish by any means, nor all I've read.

One of their top Editors, Juliet Grames, is an Edgar award winner for editing. She has also written and had published by Soho 2 historical fiction novels that reflect some of her family heritage:
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia

Two of my favorite American crime authors are
Sujata Massey - the Perveen Mistry series set in 1920s India - The Widows of Malabar Hill

Cara Black - her Aimee Leduc Detective series set in 1990s Paris. First is Murder in the Marais

Cara also has started writing HF - first is Three Hours in Paris set at end of WWII.

Both Sujata and Cara are meticulous researchers and write engaging books.

Peter Lovesey is one of their authors.

Also some of my favorites - recent and past:
Death of a Red Heroine, first in a series by Qiu Xiaolong - lives in US and writes in English but was born in Shanghai
Jack of Spies - historical espionage
Crashed - set in California
Nina Borg Nordic Noir series - The Boy in the Suitcase
The Missing American - set in Ghana and first in a terrific series
The Tattoo Murder Case - Japanese classic from Golden Age of Japanese Detective Fiction


For a seasonal read, and a way to sample multiple authors - a collection of short stories: The Usual Santas: A Collection of Soho Crime Christmas Capers