Ask HN: What's your favorite book that nobody you know has heard of?
When Daddy Was A Little Boy: https://archive.org/details/WhenDaddyWasALittleBoy
A delightful read from my childhood that I still revisit about once a year when I've had a bit too much negativity from the news and socila media.
Fragment - Warren Fahey
A Michael Crichton-esque thriller set on an island that's been cut off from the rest of the world for 1/2 a billion years and the crazy nitro fuelled funny car of an ecosystem that's there.
It's not a surprise philosophical treatise that'll revolutionize your cognition, just a bit of good fast fun.
Thanks for posting this. I think I read about this in an HN thread years ago, but I could not remember the name.
Haruki Murakami - The elephant vanishes
As I searched for the author after reading this book by chance it seemed to me that he is quite famous - but nobody around me has ever heard of him. The book I recommend is a collection of short stories, most rooted in reality with a hint(or sometimes a container) of surreal.
Murakami is great. Have you read his other books? The latest one, Killing Commendatore, was a good read.
There was a Russian children's book that I read so many times as a kid - I think it was called Happy Family, but my memory is fuzzy.
A big part of the book is a story about two boys (and the sister of one of the boys) creating an incubator at home to hatch eggs. It is a fascinating read - how they use books to adjust heat, how they take turns watching their home made incubator, how they are so sleep deprived that one of the boys wears shoes on opposite foot...
Today's kids grow up with smartphones and ready made robot kits. But there is a lot of charm in making things with whatever stuff is around you at home.
"Consilience" E.O. Wilson (Nobel Laureate)
Small book, small words, short sentences; will kick your butt.
Anyone who browses HN regularly will probably enjoy the book "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones (or the accompanying TV show "The Secret War"). Jones was a physicist working for Churchill directly by the end of the war.
Everyone has heard of Bletchley park and the Manhattan project, but Jones's book covers the game of genuinely deadly cat and mouse that was played throughout WW2 as each side learned and adapted to eachothers scientific intelligence. Radar, Sonar (ASDIC at the time), Magnetic mines, etc.
Its easy to think of it as an intellectual game of chess but it is telling that when the Allies bombed Peenemunde (Nazi area 51) they flew straight over the laboratories to bomb the houses of the scientists.
The TV adaptation is brilliant - thoughtful documentary production, not dumbed down, and most of the people were still alive when it was filmed.
Edit: for anyone reading the book look out for mentions of any members of the Cambridge five - Jones was shunned after the war so he is perhaps overly kind to Kim Philby. The same system that allowed the KGB to run wild wouldn't recruit Jones into intelligence work for being of the wrong sort (apparently - according Peter Wright)
Adventures in Immediate Unreality by Max Blecher
Translation from the Romanian available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/AdventuresInImmediateUnreality
About Max Blecher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Blecher
This book is a masterpiece. Very few people have heard of it, and until roughly a decade ago, Blecher was almost completely unknown outside of Romania.
Most people haven't heard of Betty White's Miracle at Carville.
It's the autobiography of a Southern debutante in Louisiana who contracted Hansen's disease. She is sent to a leper colony and spends the next 20 years there.
Copies of the book are quite expensive on Amazon but I was able to obtain it as an interlibrary loan.
The Internet Archive also has it available for lending.
Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen, by Roahl Dahl
The Earth Abides, by George Stewart. Story is set in Berkeley, CA after a disease kills most life on earth, maybe a little too on the nose these days...
Paolo Bacigalupi's short stories (e.g. Pump Six), some of which he later turned into longer books.
Courtship Rite, by Don Kingsbury. Plot is kind of bland but the worldbuilding is fantastic, essentially an attempt to create a world where cannibalism isn't immediately though of as an ultimate evil, which leads to odd implications for society.
Travels, by Michael Crichton - a sort of autobiography with some excellent lessons on life. I've never met anyone else who's read it for some reason.
Ishmael - recommended on here but doesn't seem well known in the UK. Everyone I've recommended to has enjoyed
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Proof that politics hasn't changed much in 100 years
Jonathon Livingston Seagull - again well known on here, but not so much generally
I can vouch for Travels - nice to see someone mention it! It is a great book. Crichton had a fascinating career - he was in medical school, but he was insanely productive writing novels and earning a living. He was a fantastic writer, director, traveler, producer...
Strangely, for someone so brilliant, he did not believe in global warming!!!
Yes, he had some strange beliefs, I think he decided he wanted to be Arthur Conan Doyle.
This is one of my favorites: "The Sprite: The Story of a Red Fox." It was first published in 1924 I think, I have a later copy from 1927? It's the true story of a pet fox.
Another one I liked is "Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II". This one isn't that rare but I haven't anyone mention it.
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. I live in a non-Spanish speaking country.
The Truth Machine by James Halperin
This is mediocre book with an absolutely jaw dropping concept at its core. It's worth reading for all involved with building technology.
Gotta give it to Glen Cook - The dragon never sleeps. He's better known for the Black Company series.
Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean by Morten Stroksnes
Alexander Grothendieck - Récoltes et Semailles
Understanding the present by Bryan Appleyard