Top Ten Under the Radar Books
What a great idea for a Top Ten Tuesday meme! From The Broke and the Bookish, top ten books with under 2000 Goodreads reviews.
Here’s Chachic’s set. What great choices (well, the ones I’m familiar with, which is about half of them). I might trade out And All the Stars for the Medair duology, though that’s a tough choice for me.
Here’s Brandy’s list. Well, obviously I don’t love this set of books quiiiiite as much, since none of my own books are present. Seriously, though, what surprises me is that A Face Like Glass has under 2000 reviews. But I checked just out of curiosity and I see it is not a lot less — about 1700. In contrast, though, Uprooted has about 40,000 ratings last time I checked. So you see.
Well, well. It’s a bit tricky. Let me see . . . I’m going to try to do this without repeating any books from Chachic or Brandy; not even any authors if I can manage it . . .
All right:
1. Wheel of the Infinite by Martha Wells. It’s got nearly a thousand ratings but only 83 reviews. Startlingly, I don’t appear to have posted a review for it myself. That’s just embarrassing. *Makes a note.*
2. Island of Ghosts by Gillian Bradshaw. To my astonishment, it has fewer than 600 ratings. Wow, are Goodreads patrons missing out on some great books!
3. Cuckoo’s Egg by CJ Cherryh. I figured. Anything published as far back as 1985 probably has an uphill struggle on Goodreads, even by a famous author like CJC.
4. Dun Lady’s Jess by Duranna Durgin. I always loved this one. Thinking of horses …
5. The Grey Horse by RA MacAvoy. And now that I’ve thought of MacAvoy …
6. The Lens of the World. Shameful to see how few ratings and reviews it has. Not that I’ve reviewed it, either. It’s the older-book thing again.
7. Lord of the Two Lands by Judith Tarr. One of my very favorite historical fantasies.
8. A Stranger to Command by Sherwood Smith. It’s not quite as low on ratings as some of these others, but it’s way below Crown Duel / Court Duel and that’s too bad. two more, two more, how hard can this be? FINE, let me try thinking of recent releases . . .
9. Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman. It’s getting up toward a thousand ratings now, but it’s not there yet. One more, one more . . .
10. Oh, of course. Serendipity’s Tide, first book of an indie-published trilogy that has had no publicity (as far as I know) and certainly remains thoroughly under the radar. I liked this trilogy a lot.
There you go, and that certainly reminds me to make sure I’ve posted reviews of all these myself.
