I need book recommendations!

[Queen Michael]

I love reading, and what I love reading more than anything else is obscure classics. Right now I'm reading Cat Country by Lao She. It's a Chinese satirical science-fiction novel from the 1930's. When I'm done with it, I'll read Jud Süsz by Lion Feuchtwanger, a German novel which was used as the basis for a Nazi propaganda film (even though the book's take on the protagonist's Jewish faith is pretty darn different from the one the Nazis protrayed in the movie).

Got any classic novels to recommend me? Stuff that's pretty obscure but still good? Here's the kind of thing I'm interested in:

* Books that were big at one time but are forgotten now. (Like the Tom Swift books.)
* Writers that are famous classics in one country but relatively unknown in the world in general. (Like Maria Gripe.)

Go ahead, people! Wow me!

 

[Albino Boo]

Jorge Luis Borges. He was an Argentine short-story writer poet and essayist. Perhaps was the first of the magic realists but is best known for his short story collection The Aleph.

Stefan Zweig. In the 1920s Zweig was amongst the most popular authors in the world. The Post Office Girl is perhaps his best work, and elements of that book formed the film the Grand Budapest hotel.

Jolán Földes. She only wrote one good book but it was a hit in the 30s. Street of the Fishing Cat is the tale of Hungarian refugees in post WW1 Paris.

Dennis Wheatley. Sort of the Stephen King of his day, best known for the Devil Rides Out but wrote many other series. Ranging from the French Revolution to WW2

Giovannino Guareschi. An Italian journalist, cartoonist and author. He best creation is the Don Camillo stories. Set in village in post war Italy, it deals with the tension between the Parish priest and the communist mayor. They have constant comic battles but both have the interest of the local community at heart and often end up compromising with each other in the end.

 

[Queen Michael]

Jorge Luis Borges. He was an Argentine short-story writer poet and essayist. Perhaps was the first of the magic realists but is best known for his short story collection The Aleph.

Everybody knows about Borges, you silly person, you! =) I read his Ficciones a few years back.

Giovannino Guareschi. An Italian journalist, cartoonist and author. He best creation is the Don Camillo stories. Set in village in post war Italy, it deals with the tension between the Parish priest and the communist mayor. They have constant comic battles but both have the interest of the local community at heart and often end up compromising with each other in the end.

Now this is the kind of stuff I'm interested in! I checked, and my local library has several of these books, so I'll be sure to get one the next time I'm there. (The other writers seemed good too, but this was the only one they had.)

 

[Queen Michael]

Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi are two you've probably never heard of. The former has a great book, 'This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen', and the latter more than one. 'If This Is A Man' is probably Levi's best though.

It turns out I'm in luck--both of these books were released in new editions in Swedish very recently. The Borowski book in 2014, and the Levi one in 2013.

 

[Albino Boo]

Gabriel Chevallier. He wrote the French equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front entitled Fear. However his best work is the Clochemerle novels. They are satiric look at French provincial life from the 1930s onwards.

Vasily Grossman. The Tolstoy of WW2. His best work is Life and Fate. Its not a book for the faint hearted, as it deals with the realities of the holocaust, the frontline and Soviet anti semitism. The KGB arrested the book in the late 50s and the author became an unperson, dying of stomach cancer while sweeping floors in a bus garage.

Mario Vargas Llosa. A Peruvian nobel laureate. My personal favorite is the autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

I have not far short of 1000 physical books, some dating back to the 30s. I could go on all day but I think thats enough to be going on with.

Edit: If you have never read any Primo Levi, do so immediately. I suspect it's my age but I find it difficult believe that he's obscure now.

 

[Fox12]

Hmm, well I've always had an interest in reading the works that inspired writers that inspired me.

Tolkien, for instance, was a huge influence on me. Here's a list of his influences:
-Kalevala, the epic of Finland. It's a great bit of epic poetry that's utterly unknown in English speaking nations. I have to depend on translations myself, but you may enjoy it.
-The prose and poetic Eda. Basically, viking mythology. It's basically the definition of epic. Great mythology, second only to the Greeks.
-Beowulf. It's surprising how many people haven't read this. Give it a try.

I don't believe you're American, correct? How well acquainted are you with Faulkner? That would count as foreign, though it's not perhaps obscure. He's a great experimental writer, if you like something unusual. The Sound and the Fury is a great place to start.

You could always give James Joyce a try. If you're insane. Supposedly the most difficult writer to read in the English language.

Greek tragedies are always great. Oedipus Rex is my favorite, and you may have already read it, but there are plenty more.

I'm about to start 100 years of solitude, translated. It seems like a good bit of literature.

Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi are two you've probably never heard of. The former has a great book, 'This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen', and the latter more than one. 'If This Is A Man' is probably Levi's best though.

It turns out I'm in luck--both of these books were released in new editions in Swedish very recently. The Borowski book in 2014, and the Levi one in 2013.

Oh, I'll second "This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen." Completely altered my view of the Holocaust. Easily the best WW2 book I've come across. It's pretty gruesome, though, even by the standards of Holocaust literature. You don't realize how much Holocaust literature is "cleaned up." The authors uncompromising honesty is quite interesting. He doesn't try to make anyone look good, including the prisoners, or even himself.

 

[Queen Michael]

Hmm, well I've always had an interest in reading the works that inspired writers that inspired me.

Tolkien, for instance, was a huge influence on me. Here's a list of his influences:
-Kalevala, the epic of Finland. It's a great bit of epic poetry that's utterly unknown in English speaking nations. I have to depend on translations myself, but you may enjoy it.
-The prose and poetic Eda. Basically, viking mythology. It's basically the definition of epic. Great mythology, second only to the Greeks.
-Beowulf. It's surprising how many people haven't read this. Give it a try.

I don't believe you're American, correct? How well acquainted are you with Faulkner? That would count as foreign, though it's not perhaps obscure. He's a great experimental writer, if you like something unusual. The Sound and the Fury is a great place to start.

You could always give James Joyce a try. If you're insane. Supposedly the most difficult writer to read in the English language.

Greek tragedies are always great. Oedipus Rex is my favorite, and you may have already read it, but there are plenty more.

I'm about to start 100 years of solitude, translated. It seems like a good bit of literature.

I'm in the middle of the Swedish translation of Kalevala. It's really good.

I've been wanting to read the Edda for ages. Someday, I'll get around to it.

I read Beowulf back in 2008. Good stuff.

I got As I Lay Dying fromt he library a while back. I'll read it some week soon.

Joyce? Hm... Maybe.

Greek tragedies are a good idea. I haven't read Oedipus Rex, or any other for that matter.

 

[Fox12]

Greek tragedies are a good idea. I haven't read Oedipus Rex, or any other for that matter.

Oedipus Rex may be the greatest play I've ever read, including the works of Shakespeare. You could finish it in a lazy afternoon, but it's worth the read. It's insanely intricate, and the writing flows pretty easily. A very emotional piece of work.

On a side note, you can see how it obviously influenced my favorite story, Berserk. Which is nice.

 

[Cowabungaa]

Greek tragedies are a good idea. I haven't read Oedipus Rex, or any other for that matter.

In the same regard, have you read some of Plato's Dialogues? That's some outstanding ancient prose right there. It's one thing to read about Plato's ideas, it's really another to experience them as he wrote them down (well, as close as you can unless you can read ancient Greek).

Also, there's always crazy-as-fuck early-Renaissance literature. Stuff like Rabelais' Pantagruel books. I read a few bits of those and, man, they're something else alright.

A fun little short read might be Swift's A Modest Proposal. It's only like, ten-ish pages, but it's subject is fascinating, the style of satire outstanding and subtle (well, subtle and extremely not-subtle at the same time) and surprisingly relevant. I'd recommend A Tale of a Tub as well, though I have yet to read that myself. But from what I heard he refined his satirical style even more in that one, and it was already awesome in A Modest Proposal.

Honestly, there's a lot of good political philosophy in prose form. Bacon, More, Milton, Mandeville, they're all good reads.

 

[Queen Michael]

Also, there's always crazy-as-fuck early-Renaissance literature. Stuff like Rabelais' Pantagruel books. I read a few bits of those and, man, they're something else alright.

I've been thinking of reading those for some time now. The only problem is that they seem a bit too indecent for my taste. I haven't ruled them out completely, though.

 

[Lord Garnaat]

A Canticle for Leibowitz is considered a classic of the sci-fi genre, but almost no one talks about it any more. Basically, it's a post-apocalyptic book (one of the first of its kind) set after a nuclear holocaust remembered as the "Flame Deluge" wiped out civilization as we know it. It also, however, created a huge surge of violent anti-intellectualism that targeted the people believed to be responsible for the disaster, starting with politicians and scientists but ending with the merely literate. Widespread book-burning follows, ignorance is held as a virtue, and people now call themselves "simpletons" as a point of pride. So, in order to prevent society from forgetting its past, a group of monks called the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz dedicate themselves to preserving all knowledge of the past in order to try and save the future.

It's a sprawling, very intricate story that spans centuries as civilization rebuilds itself and is forced to either learn from its mistakes or repeat them, and explores complicated questions of what role technology, religion, and secular power play in our lives, as well as what role they should play. I've personally read it four times in the course of a year now, and I would highly, highly recommend it (and I have been to almost everyone I know).

 

[the December King]

I have mentioned this before in writing posts, but I cannot recommend strongly enough the works of T.E.D.Klein for those who enjoy Lovecraftian horror. He only wrote four short stories and a novel, but the short stories are some of the best of the niche genre to be penned, in my opinion. Solid horror, with a bleak veneer of drab, modern sensibility overhanging the protagonists instead of a turn of the (last)century isolationist misanthropy, which works delightfully in bringing the cosmic horror into the post modern age.

 

[Korenith]

If you can hack a bit of modernist weirdness Flann O'Brien's "At Swim Two Birds" is an interesting and challenging read.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon's "Scot's Quair" trilogy is also pretty good, though a bit more traditional in it's writing.

If you're interested in some more modern stuff I have more recommendations but I'm not sure it comes under the "classic" or even the "obscure" requirements.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

The Bottersnikes and Gumbles series. Australian classics.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Might want to check out Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, a pretty well regarded writer in Hungary but not so much outside the country.

 

[ZeroFarks]

Sorry, nothing in my library is pretentious enough.

 

[Cowabungaa]

Also, there's always crazy-as-fuck early-Renaissance literature. Stuff like Rabelais' Pantagruel books. I read a few bits of those and, man, they're something else alright.

I've been thinking of reading those for some time now. The only problem is that they seem a bit too indecent for my taste. I haven't ruled them out completely, though.

Indecent? Well, it has risque humour, but it's still 16th century stuff so how bad can it get? It's mostly just really weird. What'd you call indecent?

 

[Queen Michael]

Also, there's always crazy-as-fuck early-Renaissance literature. Stuff like Rabelais' Pantagruel books. I read a few bits of those and, man, they're something else alright.

I've been thinking of reading those for some time now. The only problem is that they seem a bit too indecent for my taste. I haven't ruled them out completely, though.

Indecent? Well, it has risque humour, but it's still 16th century stuff so how bad can it get? It's mostly just really weird. What'd you call indecent?

Well, for one thing I heard that there was this part where somebody urinated voluminously in a church. Honestly, it's not really about what things the books contain as much as how it handles them.

 

[Breakdown]

The Bottersnikes and Gumbles series. Australian classics.

I was thinking of this series the other day but I couldn't remember the name or author.

I'm not sure how obscure they are, but the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander have a cool Welsh vibe going on and are an interesting alternative to the Narnia books and Lord of the Rings.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

Well, I can't recommend you anything too old, but I've got an author I think you'd enjoy. His name is Markus Zusak, and he's an Australian Author. He has two really good books: The Messenger (or I Am The Messenger) and The Book Thief. I seriously recommend them both, especially The Book Thief.