What Is The Last (Or Most) Obscure Book You Read? (7/20/25)

[Marc]

What's the last book you read that you would describe as "obscure?" And/or, what would you say is the MOST obscure book you've ever read? You can define "obscure" however you like (least reviews on GR, a book you think few people have ever heard of, a book that is now incredibly hard to find, etc.)

[Monica]

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

[Emmeline]

I read Haste Ye Back by Dorothy H Kaynes, a nostalgic (strange as that may sound) memoir of growing up in an orphanage in Northern Scotland. It's also the last book I just plucked off a shelf at random, and reminds me that I should let more random books into my life.

[Sam]

My book is not that obscure but is not often read when looking at Goodreads ratings. What is interesting is how often I have thought of this journal with its odd language and ideas. I have a feeling it was a source for Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia: and North Carolina

Excerpts:
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/...

Review:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

[Kathleen]

This is a great question, Marc, and I look forward to checking these out!

My favorite obscure book is one of my favorite books. It may not be the most obscure book I've read, but it only has 110 reviews, yet a 4.17 avg rating: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories by William Saroyan. It's a book of short stories written in the 1930's when the author was a young unknown (later wrote The Human Comedy). I've never read anything else like it.

[Sam]

Kathleen wrote: "This is a great question, Marc, and I look forward to checking these out!

My favorite obscure book is one of my favorite books. It may not be the most obscure book I've read, but it only has 110 r..."

Thanks! I ordered it.

[Bill]

I started Gareth Hopkins' abstract graphic novel Found Forest Floor. One rating, zero reviews on goodreads. I think that counts?

It's quite interesting for the first 20 pages or so, but I'm not sure how this can be sustained for 100+ pages. (Says the guy with a self-professed short attention span.) What I've seen of his later (also obscure!) work looks more approachable.

[Stacia]

Useless Miracle which I recently finished & seems obscure if you go by the number of GR reviews. One with even fewer reviews/ratings is Legends of Salamanca which I found in a used bookstore last year. (I can't really recommend either of those.) A couple of others with few reviews that I do recommend if you have interest in the subjects are The Darkening Ecliptic & Kan Ya Ma Kan: Folktales and Recipes of Syria and Its Ethnic Groups.

For one that "feels" obscure because it's just plain bizarre, I'll put Motherfucking Sharks, lol. (I could probably come up with more in the bizarre category too but Motherfucking Sharks popped into my mind because I rediscovered it on my bookshelves recently.)

[Kathleen]

Sam wrote: "Thanks! I ordered it."

This makes me happy, Sam! I hope you enjoy it.

[Alwynne]

Recently, based on the number of GR ratings anyway:

Roses for Hedone: On Queer Hedonism and World-Making Through Pleasure a chapbook so not easy to track down, really interesting ideas

Kim Soom's No Hand Held Mine: Stories ― "Granny Wild Goose" and "The Root's Tale"

Brais Lamela's What Remains really powerful novel that deserves a much wider readership

And in general:

Poet Muriel Rukeyser's arresting Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast

Polish author Bruno Jasienski's 1920s novel I Burn Paris fascinating piece of political, speculative fiction

Ethel Mannin's Lucifer and the Child an unusually inventive tale of witchcraft and the supernatural from 1945

[Marc]

Hmm... Quite recent, but more of a tiny chapbook, but certainly obscure by dint of what I imagine to be an incredibly small print run:
INSECTUM OBITUS by Jone Greaves
(described as "A zine about prominent deaths in the bug community.")
https://www.instagram.com/p/C4o2IZ4L1dL/

One of my favorite obscure works:
Blaster: The Blaster Al Ackerman Omnibus

It's interesting to see some of the more accomplished writers whose early works have very few GR reviews (thinking here of something like Cynthia Ozick's first novel, Trust).

[Lark]

An incredible, incredibly obscure book that should not be out of print: Feldafing by Simon Schochet, an extraordinary memoir of a camp for displaced people in the immediate days following the end of WWII.

The two most obscure books I own are both interesting enough, and out-of-copyright enough, to have spawned all kinds of self-published editions, so in some fashion or another they aren't really all that obscure any longer unless you want the original books:

THE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS by Samuel Gladstone (1957)

and

The Telephone Hand-Book by Herbert Laws Webb (1894)

[Franky]

I think at the time I read it, House of Leaves was one of the most obscure books I've read in terms of its obtuseness and oddness.

[Alwynne]

Franky wrote: "I think at the time I read it, House of Leaves was one of the most obscure books I've read in terms of its obtuseness and oddness."

Loved that one!

[Jenna]

The most obscure book I've ever read I read with this group actually - Nobody Will Bury Us If We Die Here.

My other recent somewhat obscure reading (some in progress) is just out of print things that really should not be forgotten and are in <300 reviews range: Willard and His Bowling Trophies, The Death of Virgil, Group Portrait with Lady - W/B 2 by Boll.

[Hugh]

I have a few that were given to me for one reason or other.

A Short History of the Future was one which I rescued from my late grandfather's shelves - published in 1955, it links various visions of the future from earlier literary works into a pseudo-academic history book. When I looked for it here I couldn't find it, but somebody has now added it.

Then there were a few that my parents picked up on holiday - The Piddle Valley Book of Country Life and Bare Feet and Tackety Boots being a couple of examples.

Jenna's reply reminds me that I participated in our second Carolyn Chun discussion on How to Break Article Noun, a book which still has very few reviews.