30 Days of Book Talk discussion

What books have you read that we’ve almost certainly never heard of (or if we have, it’s only from you)?

My world books challenge means I’ve read some incredibly obscure stuff. Here are the most obscure books I've actually liked, based on number of Goodreads ratings:

Carmela: 3 ratings. This one is almost cheating since it’s only available in Spanish. An apparently semi-autobiographical tale of a Bolivian journalist going into and out of exile under various regimes, and into and out of several love affairs.

The Ladies Are Upstairs: 19 ratings. A decent short story collection set in Grenada.

Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (32 ratings) is actually a really fantastic book despite its incredible obscurity. It’s part memoir, part anthropology, as the author, who is from Cyprus (which is currently divided between the official Greek-majority country and the Turkish zone which is a de facto country but only recognized by Turkey), meets people on both sides of the divide and learns a lot about political memory and polarization.

Maria Sibylla Merian: Artist, Scientist, Adventurer (42 ratings) is the most obscure book I really liked that isn’t for the world books challenge. It’s a recent (2018) illustrated biography of a badass 17th century woman, appropriate for kids but also worthwhile for adults.

Some Crime & Mystery novels I read years ago - picked up on a whim while browsing paperbacks at the bookstore - are now forgotten books:
In Death We Trust
Rain Lover

See? Not even cover images for the sad, neglected things.

More recently, I was surprised to read the first book in a Thriller/Crime series, by an author Mike Ripley mentions in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, enjoy it immensely, and yet be the first to rate it at Goodreads. The book is The Murder Makers by John Rossiter; apparently, reading guides will occasionally recommend books - even series - that really need some attention!

This was a really tough one - even some that I thought of as oddball books would have like 3,000 ratings! But I finally found one, an old hardcover that I picked up at a library sale years ago:

65 Great Tales Of Horror - this one is self explanatory. It has only 31 ratings and three reviews, one of which is mine :) <-- Oops! Edited, as I didn't write a review. But here it is now: an interesting collection, some of them are boring but there were a few that freaked me out and I still remember them years later.

My most obscure books are mostly non-fiction. Some only have less than a handful of ratings.

Prehistoric Games of North American Indians: Subarctic to Mesoamerica has only one rating: mine. This is very much an academic work so it's pretty dry and some of the interesting info can get buried beneath all the repetition and jargon.

Another is Community and Society in Roman Italy with 5 ratings. I had to read it for a roman archaeology class in college.

There's also some self-published stuff by friends of mine. Magical Mayhem and Cold Comfort and Other Stories have only 5 and 10 ratings respectively.

Hmm. I'm apparently the only rater of a couple of books on my read list here at GR: A Political Text-Book for 1860, Comprising a Brief View of Presidential Nominations and Elections; Including All the National Platforms Ever by Horace Greeley (yes, it's a voter's guide for 1860 - my father's family never threw anything out), Camp-Fire Girls on a Hike; or, Lost in the Great North Woods (I read a lot of antique children's lit growing up), and Building the Walls of Jerusalem: John Dewitt McCollough and His Churches (my mother wrote it).

Good books in the "10 ratings or less" category: America in 1876: The Way We Were, London's Churches, Princess Mary of Maryland, The Culture of the Twenties, The Kids' Kitchen Take-Over, The Suffragette View, Sara's Granny and the Groodle, and The Americanization of Dixie: the Southernization of America. A couple are academic, and several others are older children's books.

There are some interesting choices here! That voters’ guide from 1860 should probably be more widely read.

Whenever I am the only rater of a book, it does not last for long. I think there is some “we are all winners here!” fairy that follows me around and gives those books a higher rating than mine. (I have never been the only rater and given above three stars.)

Haha, wow, looking at my list most of the stuff with 0 or 1 or 2 ratings is computer programming related stuff or table top RPG stuff, but there is a few fictions works that are really low. David Keck's third book only has like 23 ratings and a few series that came out here but got dropped by the US publisher have very low ratings for further books, which makes me wonder if this site skews super American.

Oh, I couldn't put it down, I was in so much suspense.

There are people from all over the planet here at GR, but yeah, there are a lot of Americans.

Oh! Good topic. I had to search through my Goodreads archive to dig up obscure reads.

First up is a romantic fantasy duology by Julia Knight, The Pirates of Estovan. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. Both novels have 20 ratings which seems abnormally low to me.

Other books that have abnormally low ratings to me (>230 ratings) but I would definitely recommend as they were really good reads:
The Cobbler’s Boy novella by Elizabeth Bear.
The End of the Megafauna by Ross D.E. MacPhee. Awesome nonfiction book on recent Large animal Extinction of the Late Pleistocene such as the Woolley Mammoth. It gives a person ideas on large scale extinctions that has nothing to with humans such as climate change (sudden warming from ice ages) and in some areas all due to human hunters. As a geologist who sees extinction as a normal biological evolution, this was an illuminating book.

As usual, great question.

I think that mine is The Backup, a paranormal fantasy-ish book that is really just an exploration of power dynamics in bad relationships. I read it because the author is an old Internet friend of mine and I wanted to support her when she got published. I even found the book on a shelf in my local library, which I thought was awesome - I'd heard she was getting something published and assumed it would be an e-book only thing.

It has like 65 ratings on GR so it is decidedly an obscure work. I'm glad my friend made it in print.

Bordélyház Bizáncban, this book has only one other rating besides mine.

It translates as "Brothel in Byzantine" and it's a short historic-fiction novella about how Justinian (Eastern Roman emperor from 527 to 565) met her future wife Theodora as a prostitute a in a brothel and how they conspired together with his friend and later general Belisarius to ascend the throne and make Theodora empress.

It's a highly entertaining read, concentrating on political intrigue of just a short period.

It was published in 1987 and not a well-known book, unless you happen to be interested in the author's work in general. A friend of mine recommended it to me in high school, otherwise I wouldn't have known about it either. :)