Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 2011

Message Bookmarked
Bookmark Removed

hi

Poll Results

OptionVotes
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 14
Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 4
City Of Bohane by Kevin Barry 2
Embassytown by China Mièville 2
There But For The by Ali Smith 1
Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère 1
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell 1
Reamde by Neal Stephenson 1
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides 1
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt 1
A Cruel Bird Came To The Nest And Looked In by Magnus Mills 1
The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller 1
The Martian by Andy Weir 1
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline 1
Nothing Holds Back The Night by Delphine de Vigan 0
Faces In The Crowd by Valeria Luiselli 0
Among Others by Jo Walton 0
The Devil All The Time by Donald Roy Pollock 0
On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe 0
Angel Of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap 0
Dagny Or A Love Feast by Zurab Karumidze 0
The Infatuations by Javier Marías 0
The Man With The Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi 0
Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin 0
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst 0
The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes 0
The Islanders by Christopher Priest 0
The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett 0
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin 0
The Kingdom Of Gods by N.K. Jemisin 0
The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson 0
Pigeon English by Stephen Kellman 0
Zone One by Colson Whitehead 0
Death Comes To Pemberley by P.D. James 0
The French Art Of War by Alexis Jenni 0
Fifty Shades Of Grey by E.L. James 0
Open City by Teju Cole 0


Daniel_Rf, Friday, 26 November 2021 13:19 (two years ago) link

Very much Ferrante for me.

Daniel_Rf, Friday, 26 November 2021 13:19 (two years ago) link

that's the only one i've read, so that

Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Friday, 26 November 2021 13:20 (two years ago) link

who will vote for Ready Player One?

Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Friday, 26 November 2021 13:21 (two years ago) link

A big swathe of meh and haven’t read for me. I read Fifty Shades when it was being published online for free and was a notorious fic people were constantly going “wtf” at, it’s honestly shocking to me it got as big as it did.

mardheamac (gyac), Friday, 26 November 2021 13:30 (two years ago) link

Wish I could remember more about Nothing Holds Back the Night; it won a bunch of french prizes and also iirc caused some controversy in france and within her family with its memoir disguised as fiction approach. Probably another one to add to the re-read pile. But yeah it's gotta be Ferrante.

namaste darkness my old friend (ledge), Friday, 26 November 2021 13:56 (two years ago) link

I started reading the Ali Smith but never got past the first section despite being intrigued. Can’t account for that.

Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 26 November 2021 14:12 (two years ago) link

Otherwise, this is another poll where I got nothin’.

Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 26 November 2021 14:16 (two years ago) link

Milllllllssss

A Cruel Bird is one of my shouts for 'most underrated book I've read'; it absolutely belongs on that 'literary treats' thread; it conveys a world of crazed simplicity and grave humour with the lightest possible touch

imago, Friday, 26 November 2021 15:02 (two years ago) link

i've read the 3 you expect i've read

The Martian by Andy Weir
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller

but not the other one you expect i've read (Reamde) - it's on the TODO list, but quite low because it's 900 pages

koogs, Friday, 26 November 2021 16:19 (two years ago) link

*resists urge to vote for Ready Player One just to troll you all*

emil.y, Friday, 26 November 2021 16:59 (two years ago) link

Ferrante.

Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 26 November 2021 17:19 (two years ago) link

Man, A Dance With Dragons is over a decade old. GRRM should def consider writing a sequel!

jmm, Friday, 26 November 2021 17:22 (two years ago) link

is Lightning Rods in the same ballpark of greatness as DeWitt 1 btw

imago, Friday, 26 November 2021 18:07 (two years ago) link

i own it but still have yet to read it

STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Friday, 26 November 2021 18:10 (two years ago) link

I liked Lightning Rods, but it's much smaller-scale than The Last Samurai and has a very weird sense of humor that could easily be off-putting.

Lily Dale, Friday, 26 November 2021 18:12 (two years ago) link

TLS is basically a neuroatypical symphony and creed so I'm not surprised if she felt emboldened to Go Weirder, sounds delightful tbh!

imago, Friday, 26 November 2021 18:16 (two years ago) link

Yeah I found Lightning Rods pretty funny but part of it was just that someone would decide to write a book like this in the first place.

Have also read The Sense of an Ending (a drag) and Open City (good, I think, still not sure how I feel about the ending).

JoeStork, Friday, 26 November 2021 20:34 (two years ago) link

think the only one i've read is zone one

mookieproof, Friday, 26 November 2021 20:36 (two years ago) link

Have read more of these than the previous year's list:
The Martian, Ready Player One, Reamde, Swamplandia!, Embassytown, A Sense of an Ending. I have a soft spot for Embassytown due to attending a reading Mièville did.

Jaq, Friday, 26 November 2021 21:32 (two years ago) link

Limonov, though it isn't a novel at all.

alimosina, Friday, 26 November 2021 23:27 (two years ago) link

I've just seen Open City, which isn't as good a novel as My Brilliant Friend, but has probably stayed with me to a greater extent. Also a shout out for the Ben Lerner (if only for the section on John Ashbery).

Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 26 November 2021 23:30 (two years ago) link

Yeah, tough time picking between those two. Did you participate on the Open City book club thread, can’t remember.

Duck and Sally Can't Dance (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 26 November 2021 23:32 (two years ago) link

I don't think I did, no. Will look for the thread (and listen to some Mahler).

Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 26 November 2021 23:34 (two years ago) link

Leaving the Atocha Station, Zone One, and Among Others are just wonderful (in extremely different ways, though now that I think of it there's something tonally similar between the slightly chilled, distant narrators of the Lerner and the Whitehead) but in a year with My Brilliant Friend they are not contenders for me.

Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, 27 November 2021 00:30 (two years ago) link

Yeah. But I knew Whitehead was qualified to write Zone One when he disclosed in The New Yorker's Science Fiction Issue (they've only done the one, right?) that he was a Psychotronic Magazine junkie in the 80s. Jacket flap promised literary satisfaction x pulp gratification, and book did not disappoint. I really like Helen DeWitt and Karen Russell, so am glad I haven't read their (and other people's) books on this list, which might entail even more regrets for choosing the Ferrante, yeah, no question.

dow, Saturday, 27 November 2021 03:34 (two years ago) link

I struggled with Lightning Rods. I think it's a common problem with comic novels and me in that once I feel like I've keyed into the central idea and 'got it' I sort of switch off. It reminded me, in the broadest sense, of Catch 22 and A Confederacy of Dunces, two other books I've had to abandon because of inertia.

Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, 27 November 2021 12:46 (two years ago) link

Catch 22 is one of my favourites and Confederacy one of my most hated, I'm now curious to know where I would place Lightning Rods on that continuum.

namaste darkness my old friend (ledge), Saturday, 27 November 2021 16:59 (two years ago) link

I added My Brilliant Friend and its three companions to my to-be-read pile today.

Jaq, Saturday, 27 November 2021 17:14 (two years ago) link

The only one I've read is "My Brilliant Friend".

o. nate, Sunday, 28 November 2021 00:50 (two years ago) link

‘Leaving the atocha station’ is a great novel

flopson, Sunday, 28 November 2021 01:00 (two years ago) link

Oh wow, I’ve actually read 5 of these in the last few years, compared to the usual 0. Loved Atocha Station, and Lightning Rods, but as far as having a “very weird style of humour one could easily find off-putting”, deadpan absurdity is one of my favourite styles of humour, so…

How does The Stranger’s Child compare to the Line of Beauty? I haven’t read either but, seeing how beloved LoB is, I’m curious about TSC, which for me has the crucial benefit of being available as an audiobook.

ed.b, Sunday, 28 November 2021 16:08 (two years ago) link

A real disappointment.

So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 28 November 2021 16:11 (two years ago) link

Ferrante

xyzzzz__, Sunday, 28 November 2021 16:11 (two years ago) link

What was effortless now looks fussy, mannered, even the (better realized) contemporary section. xpost

So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 28 November 2021 16:12 (two years ago) link

These threads now making me wonder if there's any fiction from the last couple of decades that I've read that doesn't have witchers in it

huile about oeuf (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 28 November 2021 16:13 (two years ago) link

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

System, Monday, 29 November 2021 00:01 (two years ago) link

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

System, Tuesday, 30 November 2021 00:01 (two years ago) link

A resurgence of interest, lots of voters coming back, refreshing.

dow, Tuesday, 30 November 2021 02:17 (two years ago) link

I mean, lots and lots and lots of people read that Ferrante (and I'm guessing most liked it, because it's great!)

Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, 30 November 2021 03:02 (two years ago) link

My challenge is going to be to not vote for each of the other Naples books

Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, 30 November 2021 03:02 (two years ago) link

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 2012

Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 30 November 2021 11:51 (two years ago) link

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - 1

koogs, Tuesday, 30 November 2021 12:24 (two years ago) link

If it had been listed I probably would have voted for Train Dreams.

JoeStork, Tuesday, 30 November 2021 17:34 (two years ago) link


You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.