BBAW — Forgotten Treasure

Today's Book Blogger Appreciation Week topic is...

Thursday—Forgotten Treasure
Sure we’ve all read about Freedom and Mockingjay but we likely have a book we wish would get more attention by book bloggers, whether it’s a forgotten classic or under marketed contemporary fiction. This is your chance to tell the community why they should consider reading this book!

I don't know how many times I have answered questions like this with the exact same book, but I think it's a lot, and still I haven't heard much about it in the blogging world! I think it's because it's such an odd book — I have also answered many questions on what makes me love a novel with answers like plot and character, but this book isn't really about either. It's about the writing, which is brilliant and wonderful and immensely quotable.

The book is called The Manual of Detection, and it's a sort of homage to those gritty noir detective stories, one that doesn't take itself terribly seriously. The author throws in all of the classic noir tropes, but adds to them a bit of whimsical fantasy, in which the main villian once stole the entire day of November twelfth, with everyone waking up on Wednesday wondering where the heck Tuesday went. If you like the Thursday Next series, the attitude of this book is rather like that and I think you will find it amusing. But it's really the writing that I love — click that link above for one of my favorite passages from the whole thing, which is a small treatise on how "the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome."

Oooh, and this book would be perfect for the RIP Challenge. Perhaps I will go read it again!