Guest Post: To the Books Which Are Forgotten

Thank you to the lovely Victoria Jackson, who greatly reduced my stress level today by doing a guest post for me. She writes at The Endless Oceans of my Mind about movies, books, and her life in Canada and Australia. (In other words, you should totally check it out if you haven't already. After you read this post, of course).

 I'll be returning with a Friday Fiction Fix later this week. Hopefully I'll have caught up with some sleep by then. 

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I read this book the other day called Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. This girl named Liz is killed by a taxi and wakes up on a cruise ship, the SS Nile. When they arrive on shore, she discovers she's at this place called Elsewhere, the afterlife where you arrive by the cruise ship, get a job, meet other people who've died and make new friends. You age backwards from the day you die, and when you're a week old you're sent back to earth to be reborn.

Source

I've never seen it mentioned anywhere on the blogosphere (but that could have been because it was published in 2005. Apparently it was critically acclaimed, but I've still never heard of it). I've never read a review on it, I've never had it recommended to me, I've never met another person who's read it. (The only reason I read it was because it was culled from my library and I found it in a "Free Books" pile, sandwiched between a health food book from the last century and another book on teenage mental health from five million years ago. Only one person had taken it out from the library, judging from the stamp in the back.) 

And I really liked it. It was interesting and a quick read and it made me feel good. It was sad and beautiful and it meant something, and it made me happy. The characters were great and it was such a beautiful twist on life. But it's been forgotten. 

That made me wonder about all of those good books which have been forgotten. There are so many more books out there than can possibly be read, and we can never remember them all. There are so many good books that authors have poured their hearts and souls into, and they've been burned for politics or dropped in the cull pile because no one borrowed them from the library or didn't get enough hype so they fizzled out and died. There are good books which have been lost because other books were better or because their covers weren't very good, or because a thousand years ago the scroll fell off the wagon and landed in the river or have accidentally been put on the bottom shelf and collected dust for too many years. 

So here's to you. Here's to the books which have been forgotten. 

Have you read any forgotten books? If you could chose one book to bring back into the limelight, which one would it be?