Up from Oblivion

I have recently been reading--and very much enjoying--Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s new novel, The Angel’s Game. Like its best-selling predecessor, The Shadow of the Wind (2001), Angel’s welcomes readers into the protective recesses of Barcelona’s fictional Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a vast hidden library of obscure and underappreciated volumes that have been saved by readers who understood their worth. The concept reminds me somewhat of Patti Abbott’s “forgotten books” series. All of the participants in this now year-old Web project are guardians of neglected literature, hoping to prevent exceptional older works--many of them out of print--from disappearing out of human memory. I, for one, have found a good number of superior new reads because of this series. I hope others have as well.

Today brings a particularly rich abundance of books deserving of a second look. In addition to Nate Flexer’s write-up about The Criminal on this page, the crime-fiction volumes being touted include: Fires That Destroy, by Harry Whittington; Excellent Intentions, by Richard Hull; The Outside Man, by Richard North Patterson; The Chalk Pit Murder, by Edgar Lustgarten; Jass, by David Fulmer; The Defenders, by Edward S. Aarons (a tie-in with the 1960s TV series); Trace, by Warren Murphy; The Chinese Gold Murders, by Robert van Gulik; Pagoda, by James Atlee; and Detective Fiction (Cultural History of Literature), by Charles J. Rzepka.

Abbott features several more lost-book recommendations (among them, one about Benjamin M. Schutz’s Fistful of Empty) in her own blog, plus a list of all of this day’s participating blogs.