The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer from Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer’s permission, Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer relaunched the meme on February 15, 2013. Check out the hop here!

Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end on Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop’s purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog.

The Question of the week is: What book do you think deserves more love but flies under the radar?

And I have discovered that this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Not because I can’t think of books I love and would happily shove into other people’s hands. That’s easy. The problem is the “flies under the radar” part.

Because… whose radar?

I don’t really pay much attention anymore to which books are popular. Obviously there are some books that are almost impossible not to know about, but I don’t particularly follow bestseller lists or keep track of what’s blowing up on BookTok, Bookstagram, or anywhere else.

I mostly just wander around in my own little bookish ecosystem, picking up whatever catches my attention.

And judging by the comments I get on some of my book lists, apparently quite a lot of what I read is flying under everyone else’s radar anyway!

There always seems to be at least one variation of “I’ve never heard of any of these books” in the comments, which simultaneously amuses me and makes me wonder exactly where I’m finding all these things. They don’t seem particularly obscure to me when I’m reading them. They’re just… books I’ve found and thought looked interesting.

My reading has become increasingly eclectic over the years. I’ll pick something up because I spotted it in a bookshop, because another blogger mentioned it, because the premise sounded wonderfully strange, because I’ve suddenly developed an intense need to know everything about a particular subject, or simply because the cover caught my eye.

I’m generally much more interested in whether I want to read a book than whether everyone else is reading it.

Which makes identifying one particular underrated book surprisingly difficult.

I could enthusiastically recommend something and announce that it deserves far more attention, only to discover that three million people have read it and there’s an enormous fandom somewhere I’ve simply failed to notice.

Equally, I could assume something is fairly well known because I’ve encountered it several times in my particular corners of the bookish world, only to mention it on the blog and be greeted by a chorus of “Never heard of it!”

Popularity is weirdly relative like that.

And maybe that’s one of the things I like about book blogging. We’re not all looking at exactly the same shelves. Someone’s obscure little treasure is someone else’s lifelong favourite, and something completely unknown to me might be a book another blogger has been yelling about for years.

So I’m going to slightly dodge this week’s question.

Rather than picking the book I think flies under the radar, I’m going to say that apparently I read quite a lot of books that do — I just don’t know which ones they are until I post about them!

And I’d much rather turn the question around:

What’s flying under my radar?

Tell me about the book you can’t believe more people aren’t talking about. Tell me about the strange little novel you picked up on a whim and adored. Tell me about the backlist book you’ve been recommending to everyone for twenty years.

My radar clearly isn’t terribly reliable.

Let’s see what you’ve got.