Guardian List of Ignored Books

Perhaps the ultimate project of this blog ought to be appreciating the under-appreciated. The Guardian's list is interesting and even exciting, and I haven't read a thing on it (except for Flannery O'Connor, who must be under-appreciated in Britain). However, I've already checked abebooks.com -- some of these books will be a challenge to track down.

Whoops, I just noticed there's a page 2, and I have read a couple on that page -- Breece D'J Pancake's collection (mentioned here a couple months ago, I think) and, intriguingly, Mary Robison's strange, manic, and wonderful little novel Why Did I Ever. I first read her stories in college -- An Amateur's Guide to the Night is unforgettable, a masterpiece of 80's "minimalism" (I put that term in quotes because it doesn't really do justice to that whole decade's literature, but it's still apt. The stories are short and tightly constructed. How would they come off today, I wonder? Some books time-travel better than others.)

JRL will be pleased see that one of his favorites, Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, is there, too.

Of course, appreciating the under-appreciated is an endless task, since most books are completely ignored, and many, many good ones among them. A few more just came to mind:

Rachel Cusk's The Country Life: an extremely funny novel about a woman with a mysterious past who starts her life over as an au pair for an upper class family with a disabled son. The language is convoluted in places and the ending falls to pieces, but this is a highly original novel and great fun.

Kathryn Davis's Labrador: an imaginative and highly idiosyncratic novel about a pair of sisters and a polar bear. Davis is not everyone's cup of tea, for sure, but this is a wonderful book.

Charles Baxter's First Light seems to have been reprinted last year. Good! I think it's his best novel, though I feel bad saying so, since it was also his first. It's about an astrophysicist and her brother, and it goes backward in time. One wouldn't think that could work, but it does.

Underrated Fiction: The World As I Found It

Bruce Duffy published The World As I Found It in 1987 and I first read it a few years after, having come across a copy in a bookstore in Ireland, I think. Reading the book was one of those rare transforming experiences that made me realize I wanted nothing out of life except to do that. It's the kind of book that is so good, you fall in love with the font (Bembo) and think all books should be printed in it.

It's a 700-page novel about Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but it's somehow funny, humane, and exciting, as well as brainy. Perhaps the book isn't more well-known because the subject matter puts people off, or maybe the publisher just didn't print enough copies for it to gather the cult following it deserves. I've always felt bad about it, because it took Duffy ten years to write (according to the flap copy; I've never met the guy though I certainly owe him a fan letter) and it's clearly a life's work.