Gone but not forgotten

Patti Abbott has asked me to contribute to her Friday book recommendation series. Here's her description of what she was hoping for when she began it:

recommendations of books we love but might have forgotten over the years. I have asked several people to help me by also remembering a favorite book. . . . I'm worried great books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next

I am slow off the mark this morning--just got back from Florida, where I did my first triathlon and also ate an ice cream in the shape of Mickey Mouse. It was an utterly delightful trip.

Book recommendations? I am always so full of 'em that I hardly know what to say!

The older novel that I am constantly recommending (it is my favorite novel of all time) is Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows. But I am thinking for today that we want the great books of the more recent past. I am not sure I am really doing anything very complimentary by singling out people's books as slightly forgotten! Novels that received some considerable attention, then, but that deserve to remain front-and-center in the readerly imagination: Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby; Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name; Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai. Jo Walton's Farthing books also, and Charlie Williams' Deadfolk and sequels...

But I think the novel I will particularly single out for passionate recommendation is Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature. I see she has a truly demented-sounding book coming out this fall--hmmm, better get hold of a copy of that one...

I do not actually have this novel in my possession; I have had several copies, but they have been pressed into the hands of other readers. So I can't give a great excerpt or description here. Here, though, are the previous Light Reading mentions; and here is where I really delved into it.

Nico and I continue to have regular e-mail exchanges where we foam at the mouth with excitement at the appearance of the latest Critical Shopper column...