Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1924

Edgar Wallace and Edgar Rice Burroughs both seem to have contracted big gambling debts in 1924, as they released like seven books each this year that I had to omit to get this down to 50.

There's an interesting episode of Backlisted on The Constant Nymph.

Wish RAG would participate in these to drop knowledge on the Lord Dunsany ouevre.

My headcanon is that Precious Bane is about the Batman baddie.

Need to get around to Joseph Roth. Had never heard of Hyun Jin-geon, despite making some attempts to get into Korean lit last year.

A Passage To India is badass and y'all should read it but in the interest of fighting anglo supremacy my vote goes to The Magic Mountain, which is truly an astounding acheivement. Amazing opening lines.

The Magic Mountain. There aren't a lot of books that come close, from '24 or any other year for that matter. A staggering piece of work.

1924 is the last year for stuff being generally available in the public domain (after this it relies on the author being dead for 75 years (uk and us, 50 in aus iirc)).

I haven't read any of these titles including the big ones, to my great shame.

The Ship of Ishtar is as close as Merritt gets to sword and sorcery and is one of his weirdest books

The Land That Time Forgot is a good entry point for non-Tarzan Burroughs

voted for The Magic Mountain

There are moments of dazzling brilliance in The Magic Mountain, but a lot of it didn't connect with me, long stretches where I got impatient with it instead of being able to savour it. I'm tempted to vote for it anyway for some of the stunning passages, but I might just abstain.

I had a Christie phase when I was a kid but aside from the most famous ones I've been struggling to remember which book is which and which ones I've actually read.

Anyone read/got anything to say about the Döblin?

Not read it, but I gotta say doing these polls has taught me Doblin was a much weirder and more eclectic writer than Berlin Alexanderplatz made me think.

NYRB have been giving Doblin a good go and getting a lot of his other work published.

Read Alexanderplatz a long time ago. Remember a really good feel for that down and out life, but inevitably the Fassbinder adaptation is so so good. I should revisit via the new translation.

The Magic Mountain really didn't flow much for me, even if I am very drawn to the themes in it. Musil reads a lot better in English to me.

I went for Joseph Roth.

Have only read We and Doctor Doolittle's Circus, close-run contest but I plumped for the Zamyatin.

The Joseph Roth is great, the Zamyatin is very good. The Dunsany is also very good if you have a taste for that sort of thing.
Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki is excellent and lurid and sexy.
Some Do Not is wonderful too, but usually read as part of the compiled Parade's End.
The Boy In The Bush by D.H. Lawrence is a weird one--it's actually by an Australian writer who sent her manuscript to Lawrence and instead of just editing he basically rewrote most of it.
The Dream by HG Wells is fun, using future people to sneer at the stupidities of the 1920s, but not one of his great books.
I'm going to go for Forster because, feebly, I haven't read the Mann.

Might go with Forster too; have only read ye olde H.T. Porter-Lowe's beefy British translation of TMM, though I have a much more recent one somewhere. Those are the only two I've read.

It's the Ford Madox Ford for me though I've heard great things about We

I remember the book being a lot more experimental than the Fassbinder tv show, which is mostly in a conventional social realist mold (until that last episode, lol).

The Boy In The Bush by D.H. Lawrence is a weird one--it's actually by an Australian writer who sent her manuscript to Lawrence and instead of just editing he basically rewrote most of it.

lol that sounds...sketchy

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

Love that top2.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1925

I'll have to pick up Naomi sonetime

Love all the Soseki I've read so far.

I reread The Magic Mountain at the start of the pandemic. It does windy in spots.