Little Known Favorites

Evil Mommy (aka Karen M and Spyderkl) taged me with the 'little known favorites' meme: "List and describe three of your favorite books that other people might not be familiar with. Then tag five people."

Okay...this takes some thought...

The first one is easy: High Albania, by Mary Edith Durham. Durham was an Englishwoman suffering from depression who, on her doctor's advice, traveled to the Balkans and wound up devoting her life to the region. This book is the account of a 1910 trip through the highlands of Albania, an ethnographic travelogue of the most remote backwater in Europe. Durham has a sharp eye for detail, an engaging sense of humor, and (apparently) absolutely no fear.

This one is fairly obscure here, but very well known in Brazil: Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. This is a contemporaneous history of the Canudos campaign in the 1870s, in which the Brazilian army besieged and eventually (after several attempts) exterminated a millenarian religious community led by a messianic prophet. This story was the basis for Vargas Llosa's War of the End of the World; despite my general preference for fiction, I like da Cunha's version better.

Finally, one that isn't obscure exactly but isn't as well known as it should be: The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany. Dunsany sort of invented the fantasy genre, but more importantly he's a storyteller with an extraordinarily vivid imagination, a musical prose style, and a sly sense of humor. His short stories are probably his best work, but this is my favorite of his novels.

I'm not up to the challenge of figuring out whom to tag...so if you're reading this, consider yourself tagged. (If, that is, you want to be.) Post a link to yours in the comment thread, and I'll tag you retroactively.