Truth Partisan, where are you? How can it be Sunday? Whither Corrente? Shall venerable tradition be so lightly discarded?

Ok, I'll start. What's your favorite book that nobody else you know has read or even heard of?

Mine is The Ballad of Typhoid Mary by J.F. Federspiel, published in an English translation by Joel Agee in 1983. I picked it up on a whim in a used bookstore and have treasured it through many downsizings of my personal library. The epigram on the frontispiece is Life is strange and the world is bad (Thomas Wolfe). The book tells the life of Typhoid Mary (yes, a real person) in novel form. Federspiel achieves the rare feat of telling many unhappy truths straight out while taking you by the hand, so to speak, and walking companionably and pleasantly with you to the sad end.

Such a balance is, in my experience, intensely personal for the reader rather than a universal property. Saramago's Blindness, for instance, was that kind of book for someone I know, while I found it blazingly beautiful but also nightmare-inducing.