By saying unpopular, I don’t imply any kind of superiority, due to being noncommercial – I mean simply books that aren’t popular currently.
Classics don’t belong to this category. After all classics *are* popular.
Unpopular book can be anything. It can be old bestsellers that aren’t currently in fashion. It can be genre fiction, it can be literary fiction… doesn’t matter. The only criteria for this definition of “unpopular books” is books that are right now not read by many people.
Now that I’ve clarified semantics, I would like to ask, do you read unpopular / obscure books?
How do you feel about it?
I don’t often read such books, but sometimes it does happen. Most often when I find some old book in my personal library, that has been collecting the dust for decades. Such books are typically not very popular. Maybe they had their days, but now they’ve fallen into obscurity. This happens to most books from the past, regardless of genre.
Only the best books from the past become classics. All the rest, become more or less obscure, even if they were popular when they were new.
How do you approach such books?
How do you feel when you are among just 10 or 20 people who have graded a book on Goodreads?
For me it’s a bit lonely feeling as it’s hard to find someone to discuss the book with. On the other hand such books become a part of my unique experience in life that’s shared with few other people.
by zjovicic
6 Comments
Honestly, I’ve never been on Goodreads. I recently posted on ‘I read a book and adored it’ about a book, Edith Holler, that I loved, and got questions about how do you find a book like that? Why is it rated so low on Goodreads? I found it at the library. I liked the look of it. Beats me what’s going on on Goodreads, I have no idea why I would want Amazon to know what I read!
There’s a whole world of us who don’t worry about that. I suspect we overall might be older but I hope not. If you’re like me and you just go to the library new shelf or, if there’s nothing there, wander around in the stacks looking for anything that catches your eye, you’re probably reading plenty of unpopular books. You just don’t know it.
When I was growing up, honestly, the popular books were mostly trash and a lot of great books flew under the radar. I don’t see that anything much has changed.
(I’m not trying to start a fight over what a classic is, by the way, but from my perspective that’s not a bulletproof category either. Some of the books that have managed to become “classics” probably don’t deserve it/it hardly has to do with quality. Some books that really were incredibly good— Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim leaps to mind – seem to have been forgotten.)
I do, but I don’t much feel any different about it? I tell my friends about them even if they’ve never read or heard of the book, discuss the events or thematics, share highlighted portions and whatnot. It’s just like any other book.
I do read obscure books, it feels weird that people don’t really know about them. Especially since I tend to read Doctor Who books from the 1990s, but I can understand why they don’t get talked about much as unlike the show or the audio dramas, there’s no way to buy them except on the second-hand market and their prices tend to get marked up according to the significance of the book. Lungbarrow is one of the most infamous books and often goes for hundreds of pounds.
I totally disagree that classics can’t be unpopular. I’m working my way through John Galsworthy’s books he wrote under the pseudonym John Sinjon and he refused to have most of them republished while he was alive. I have never met anyone I can talk to about Jocelyn. I’ve never met anyone who has read Fraternity by John Galsworthy either…
I sort of do. I have a few publishers in particular that I like that publish reprints or things that haven’t been translated to English yet.They’re rarely super obscure as the publishers definitely have other fans, but they’re not very commonly read. I almost prefer them as I find hype hurts books for me. I usually just read for me and not so much to discuss, so that doesn’t matter so much for me.
One of my favorite ways of finding books is going into used bookstores and picking through the shelves to look for anything that sounds interesting.
It does become annoying when you realize the book you liked had such a small publishing run that it functionally does not exist, so it’s impossible to recc to anyone who cannot borrow your exact copy.