Please suggest me some books from past decades and centuries that are not widely known classics but you value and would like people to discover
For me, Up the Down Staircase is a charming, funny epistolary novel about a school teacher in the city that I love.
Advise and Consent is tragic because its gay character faces legal discrimination but it is the best portrayal of the US Congress I have seen in print.
Dorothy Sayers murder mysteries feature brilliant sleuth Harriet Vane who has an egalitarian love story and is very much an early feminist without making it the focus of her identity. It also sets its mysteries within work place and other mundane settings providing great cultural history.
Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser fantasies are sexist but they are vivid ground breaking entertaining stories that shaped dungeons and dragons the game and fantasy as a genre.
Patrick OBrian Master and Commander and sequels about two friends in the British navy during the age of sail
This isn't a classic at all and I'm not even sure if I would suggest you read it but I found a book at a junk parade that my local town puts on, and it's from the 1920s. It's called commerce and industry.
It's a textbook, it says it's by j. Russell Smith/Henry Holt and company.
It's a very interesting read and talks about things like how American coal production cannot continue how it has, or how Germany is going to become an industrial powerhouse as a result of its debt, and that that's a mistake, and that we need a league of nations to prevent them from going to war again.
It's a little snapshot of what people thought about the world back in 1920, and it's an amazing little book to look at as a result.
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. It's a romance novel published in 1880 by a female telegraph operator. The romance and plot is good not great, but I found it incredibly engrossing sociologically. It's about how Miss Nathalie Rogers finds love "over the wire". She forms a romantic connection with a man she's never met in-person through near-instantaneous communication via telegraph.
I first read the book when cellphones were really taking off and more and more people began to have online relationships. A lot of old timers told me humans just can't form a real connection through texting, yet here was a romance from the 1800s that began with near-instantaneous long-distance communication! It made people in the past feel a lot more real to me; humans are still fundamentally human.
Edit: spelling
Generation X by Douglas Coupland is 30 years old, but it still captures the struggle to feel like a human rather than a commodity.
Douglas Coupland doesn’t write much anymore, but he’s well worth getting into. I’m a lifelong fan and have largely followed along with his releases. I admit I’ve had one of his later works, The Age of Earthquakes, sitting on the shelf waiting to be finished for a while now. It captures the mounting, overwhelming dread of the last couple of decades a little too well. It’s odd that Generation X seems optimistic now by comparison. I remember reading it for the first time in college and thinking it was full of angst.
I need to give it another try now that I'm older. An ex girlfriend recommended it to me when I was maybe 22 or 23 back in 2008 or 2009 and I think I got through maybe a third of it before I put it down and never touched it again.
I've seen it recommend twice this weekend, one of them being your comment.
A more updated but similar title would be A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It goes through several generations of thinking around the same topic, including into the future. It uses the music industry as an anchor. It's less mid-20s angst and more "oh god time moves so fast life hurts I don't want to die", which I think is more universal. But OP asked for books from the past, so I thought Gen X would be a good one.
I have it (A visit from the goon squad) on my Kindle, but it's not near the top of my list. I'll try Generation X one more time and then I'll try A visit from the goon squad
I really enjoyed Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings series. George R.R. Martin wrote the forward to the (recent) English version and says that it served as an inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire. I haven't actually read any Martin because I don't want to dive into a series I don't really believe will ever be finished, but I ripped through The Accursed Kings like wildfire.
Gore Vidal's Julian is another historical fiction work that I liked a lot.
I've been meaning to pick up The Accursed Kings for awhile now. Everyone I've talked to who's read them loved them.
I mentioned this recently in another thread, but Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons by Patricia C Wrede. They are YA but don't read dumbed-down or trite like a lot of fiction for young people. They are a feminist telling of a classic-style fantasy adventure story, with a lot of clever humor. As a kid I avoided reading books aimed at my age range but I read these on the recommendation of my male cousin (important because these books are definitely not just aimed at girls) and I still own copies and reread them every few years.
Another feminist (and pro-LGB ((TQIA doesn't really get brought up, but half of the series was written in the 70s and the other half in the 90s ))) SF/Fantasy series by Suzy McKee Charnas, the Holdfast Chronicles: Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, and The Conqueror's Child. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it's a dystopian future where women have been enslaved, so not something to read if you aren't in the mood for trauma. It doesn't make the women perfect innocent victims, and it shows how the Uber-Patriarchy is nearly as damaging to the men as the women.
If you liked Suzy McKee Charnas, you might like Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue series. She added a linguistic twist to it.
Oh, hey. I'm two-thirds of the way through the Native Tongue trilogy and I really like it. I'm taking this as a recommendation I should read Suzy McKee Charnas.
Whoa! I read Patricia Wrede's dragon books in middle school right when I was first starting to form real ideas about gender. I've never seen anyone else mention them before. Now I think I'm going to have to find them again and see how they hold up.
I don't know if it's well-known or not among people who aren't history nerds, but The Golden Ass is the only complete surviving Roman novel. It's about a Greek youth who dabbles in witchcraft, gets transformed into a donkey, and narrates a series of extremely bawdy misadventures as he passes from owner to owner. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is surprisingly readable and funny for something 2000 years old.
It is surprisingly funny. I wasn't really sure what I was getting into when I started it, but I enjoyed it, too.
I don't often see it discussed, but The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger is amazing. It has a SF premise, but it is really a story about relationships and dealing with the inevitable.
Be prepared to be sad for a while at the end.
It's interesting you mention that. It's genuinely a beautiful story but I always assumed it was quite well known. I would second the recommendation.
Famous Authors, Less Famous Books
Steinbeck is incredibly popular and a number of his books are absolute classics: Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden... I think his novel Tortilla Flats is his most overlooked work. It's fun and engaging and focuses on a community that is often underrepresented in the history of the American West, the Californios/Paisanos. it's a hoot.
I also like to point folks towards George Orwell's non-fiction. Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in London and Paris.
Less Well Known Authors
The Island of Sea Women is an incredible historical fiction narrative about the small Island of Jeju in Korea and the Haenyeo that live and work there. 10/10 my favorite book I read in 2021. There are some pretty graphic passages but it's a beautiful, slightly morbid read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.
I love Steinbeck! I've read some of his books several times.
For some reason, I never read his non fiction book Travels with Charley until about three years ago during the COVID quarantine. I loved it so much that I've read it every summer since then. It has become my favorite Steinbeck book.
Sinbad and Me by Kin Platt is a YA novel from my youth that enthralls without needing a Sci-Fi or fantasy setting. As a historical piece, it still holds interest today.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1429033.Sinbad_and_Me
I was always a bigger fan of Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day" over similar more popular dystopian novels like "1984" and "Brave New Wolrd." It felt edgier and more relevant to modern society. I'm surprised to see it's never being mentioned anywhere.
Vernor Vinge has two lesser known books that I think are great: A Deepness in the Sky & A Fire Upon the Deep
It's YA stuff and potentially more popular than Vinge, but Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series (Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; & Silver on the Tree) is fantastic IMO.
Finally, they're not super well known, but I value them because my fourth grade teacher who got me interested in reading introduced me to them: Terry Brooks' Magic Kingdom of Landover series is all right.
I'm not sure I'd agree that Deepness and Fire aren't well known - they both won the Hugo for best novel. But they are both absolute masterpieces.
A lesser-known Vinge novel that I think is often unfairly overlooked is Marooned in Realtime, a mystery set in deep time. It's a sequel to The Peace War, which has some interesting concepts but isn't really very good, but fortunately you don't need to read Peace War to appreciate Realtime.
I've recommended A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep probably a hundred times or more in person and have yet to meet recognition on doing so. I know they're fairly popular in certain Internet circles that I happen to run in, but even therein I often find a fair few readers who haven't heard of Vinge let alone his Zones of Thought novels. I agree that they are masterpiece works that rightly won awards, but the general public seems to be fully unaware of the author and the works, so I think they qualify as "not widely known classics."
Fair enough! The more exposure (the first two) ZoT books get, the better.
True, I should have made that explicit. There is a third book... I (and a fair few others) wish that there were not. It's not great.
Not the worst thing that I've ever read, but it's not up to the standards of the first two books.
A book I particularly love but that I don't see mentioned in a lot of places is Le Ton beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter is reasonably well-known, I think, for Gödel, Escher, Bach, but Le Ton beau de Marot is also excellent and covers similar but distinct ground.
On its face, Le Ton beau de Marot is a book about translating between different languages. Hofstadter takes a small, elegant poem by Clément Marot and uses different translations of it as jumping-off points for exploration of the many dimensions of translation. But while it discusses translation, the book also examines language itself, thought, communication, self-awareness, poetry, and Hofstadter's love for his deceased wife. Everything is woven together as parts of a unified whole.
I developed a much deeper appreciation for poetry from reading the book, and I was deeply touched by its expression of love for Hofstadter's wife. There's an emotional component, especially in the later parts of the book, that grounds the discussion of language and poetry.
I can't even sum up the book adequately because it's so sprawling, while nevertheless remaining centered on poetry and language. I really recommend reading and experiencing it yourself.
Thank you. I had never heard of this book and I already enjoy poetry.
Isaac Asimov is best known for his fiction work, but the man wrote an astonishing amount of non-fiction including a lot of popular science (though much of that is outdated nowadays). Two of his non-fiction works I rather like though is:
Asimov's Guide to the Bible
Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare
These are pretty big tomes, but I wouldn't exactly call them "academic" work. They're certainly not super rigorous, but there's a lot of really interesting insights in these books as he dissects the different works pointing out their historical context, interesting facts and his interpretations of certain things. The Shakespeare one in particular is organized in an interesting way which you don't normally see elsewhere.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
This book is guaranteed to make you angry at the world. Especially the scientific world, we've just forgot 50% of the population because they're "too hard" to study because of hormonal changes and variance.
Red Moon and Black Mountain is a fantasy novel by Joy Chant, published in 1970. It is well written and has a compelling story. Many believed it to be influenced by Tolkien, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I believe it is out of print now, so it might be hard to track down, unless you're willing to buy a used copy.
I read all three of Chant's fantasy novels, and this first one is by far her best.
I had forgotten this book. I found Red Moon and Black Mountain in the library and it was excellent.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. The book is drawn and laid out like a comic book, very easy to read and understand. It explains the medium of sequential art through sequential art. Instead of simply reading about what effect some technique is supposed to achieve and looking at some diagrams (like in a textbook), you actually experience it as you're reading about it which is very cool.
The book is actually quite well-known among comic book fans but less widely known outside of them. It has a sequel, Reinventing Comics that goes into the business side of the comic book industry.
I'm not sure how popular this is outside the German speaking countries, but I have nothing but praise for Hermann Hesse's 1922 novel Siddhartha. There is an English translation available and it is an amazing novel about self discovery.
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster
Written in 1909 and it has some REALLY eerie connections to life today and where we're headed, it's only 45 pages and $1 on Amazon (and most likely on Project Gutenberg, since its over 100 years old).
Surprisingly enough, it's not in Project Gutenberg, as far as I can tell.
But the Internet Archive has a copy you can borrow, and I found a website with the text of the story.
The Prince of Nothing series by R. Scott Bakker is a pretty unique fantasy story. It's not 100% conceptually original in every way (what fantasy series is) but the author mixes philosophy into the work in a really novel way. It's almost like he took philosophical concepts and placed them in his world as these tangible objects and characters.
It's a good mix of that, along with Dune, Wheel of Time and maybe some Warhammer grim-dark type atmosphere.
Also, Gene Wolf's "Solar Cycle" trilogy is good if you are a fan of fantasy and sci-fi. He has a very approachable style that's easy to read and the concepts in the book are neat.
The Empyrion Saga by Stephen R. Lawhead is a 2 novel science fiction series about an obscure author who is sent to a lost colony to find out what happened to it.
I've never seen it mentioned in beloved SF classics (it was written in 1985) but I've read it multiple times and have really enjoyed the characters and story progression.
I'm sure I have a few more buried deep in the recesses of my creaky brain, but I was just reminded of Margaret Atwood's books besides The Handmaid's Tale. I really liked her Oryx and Crake trilogy -- I don't remember why I picked it up at the time, but I really got into it and was surprised that I had never heard or read anything about them before. I liked The Robber Bride well enough, but it's one of my wife's favorites.
I'm going to go in a different direction and recommend a non-fiction book.
Why Nothing Works by Marvin Harris
This book was originally written in 1980 and titled America Now but renamed and had an additional introduction written in 1987 which is the version I have read.
In it, Harris shares the web of events and changes to American culture post World War II that lead to where we were in 1980 (and honestly, what impressed me the most, where we still are in many ways today in 2023). The explanations and connections are well thought out and researched (extensive citations are provided). The topics covered run the gamut from conglomerates and shoddy products, to the rise of feminism, the Stonewall riots and the "gays coming out of the closet", all the way to cults and born again Christians.
At the end, Harris provides some suggestions for ways to start to fix some of these issues. Things I wished people would've heeded 40 years ago, to be honest.
American War by Omar El Akkad
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chinghiz Aitmatov. It is a late Soviet era book that takes place in what now Kyrgyzstan, it has two plots that happen side by side, with the second one happening after the main character witnesses a unscheduled rocket launch. The main plot is about how the main character is trying to get his friend who has passed away to the traditional burial ground of his people.
While the second plot is more sci-fi in nature, think back to the rocket launch. This one is basically both the Americans and the Soviets are on joint mission to a space station. With the astronauts making contact with aliens. And I really can't say anymore without spoiling anything else.
I really don't see anything any where about this book, despite being really good. It is the typical Soviet book, like the main character is basically without any flaws, see the afterword in Roadside Picnic to see more about what the boards want.
I really enjoyed the Alexandria Quartet by Durrell which was written in the 1950s/1960s. The books are set around WW1 and WW2 in Alexandria, Egypt under the very volatile end of the British colonial rule there. It's a big ball of romantic drama all told by different characters in each book. Durrell spent time living in Alexandria and it's also a love letter to the city.