Cemetery of Forgotten Books
Apr. 12th, 2005 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelseagirlFeeling mildly schizophrenic. I have a faculty meeting this afternoon followed by an advisor meeting later this afternoon -- so I am both professor and student in rapid succession. Am slightly nervous about the advisor meeting as Maura is going to talk with me about two chapters I'm mostly done with and will be revising this summer. Hope she doesn't uncover too many fundamental flaws Robert and David didn't see. She is my Dickens maven, particularly.
I just finished reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. There was a lot I liked about it, but I figured out the Big Secret way too early on, so . . . However, there was one concept in it I really liked so I thought I'd see if I can turn it into a meme.
That would be the abovementioned Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which is a physical place in the novel, and is exactly what you think it is. So, I thought it might be fun to compile a Virtual Cemetery of Forgotten Books. What books do you cherish that nobody else knows about? They can be recent and sunk-beneath-the-radar or from waybackwhen. And, of course, maybe you only *think* you're the only one who knows about them. Here are a couple of mine; more later.
Tancred by Benjamin Disraeli. This is one weird book. A young English aristocrat goes to the Holy Land, where he has many adventures, few of which make any real sense, as the book races to a conclusion which is not a conclusion. This is the third in his Young England trilogy, and there is good reason why the first two are in print via Penguin and/or Oxford World's Classics and not this one. And yet, I proudly display my Complete Works of Lord Beaconsfield because Disraeli may not have been a good writer, but he was certainly an interesting one, and unlike most politicians who publish fiction these days, these weren't written only after he faded, and they weren't ghostwritten.
Dreamhouse by Alison Habens. I seek out contemporary novels with Alice in Wonderland themes -- this is not the best (that's probably Lisa Dierbeck's One Pill Makes You Smaller), but it contains an engagement party, an Alice-themed rave, a feminist filmmaker and her admirers, a cross-dresser, Glenda Jackson and crime all in one very odd novel. I was going to assign it to my class, but alas, it has gone out of print, at least in the US. Probably just as well as the Dierbeck was my substitute and it's excellent and captured my students' imagination. But I do regret that this book isn't more accessible since it was like chicklit gone mental -- quite amusing.
I just finished reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. There was a lot I liked about it, but I figured out the Big Secret way too early on, so . . . However, there was one concept in it I really liked so I thought I'd see if I can turn it into a meme.
That would be the abovementioned Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which is a physical place in the novel, and is exactly what you think it is. So, I thought it might be fun to compile a Virtual Cemetery of Forgotten Books. What books do you cherish that nobody else knows about? They can be recent and sunk-beneath-the-radar or from waybackwhen. And, of course, maybe you only *think* you're the only one who knows about them. Here are a couple of mine; more later.
Tancred by Benjamin Disraeli. This is one weird book. A young English aristocrat goes to the Holy Land, where he has many adventures, few of which make any real sense, as the book races to a conclusion which is not a conclusion. This is the third in his Young England trilogy, and there is good reason why the first two are in print via Penguin and/or Oxford World's Classics and not this one. And yet, I proudly display my Complete Works of Lord Beaconsfield because Disraeli may not have been a good writer, but he was certainly an interesting one, and unlike most politicians who publish fiction these days, these weren't written only after he faded, and they weren't ghostwritten.
Dreamhouse by Alison Habens. I seek out contemporary novels with Alice in Wonderland themes -- this is not the best (that's probably Lisa Dierbeck's One Pill Makes You Smaller), but it contains an engagement party, an Alice-themed rave, a feminist filmmaker and her admirers, a cross-dresser, Glenda Jackson and crime all in one very odd novel. I was going to assign it to my class, but alas, it has gone out of print, at least in the US. Probably just as well as the Dierbeck was my substitute and it's excellent and captured my students' imagination. But I do regret that this book isn't more accessible since it was like chicklit gone mental -- quite amusing.
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Date: 2005-04-12 04:33 pm (UTC)Speaking of "Alice"-inspired books, i read a really crazy one last year called One Pill Makes You Smaller (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374226490/qid=1113323550/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-4378043-2365741?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) - have you come upon this one yet? Very, very odd little book.
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Date: 2005-04-12 08:32 pm (UTC)As for One Pill, yup, and taught it in the Alice class. (I actually mention it in the last paragraph in my post. ;-) )
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Date: 2005-04-12 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-12 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-12 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-12 08:54 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I know of any others that might qualify; I'm very much a genre girl, though I occasionally make forays into more "mainstream" stuff.
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Date: 2005-04-13 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-13 04:32 pm (UTC)I also liked the prequel which hasn't been published and probably won't be at this stage.
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Date: 2005-04-13 04:41 pm (UTC)