Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1975

Less impressive than 1974 on the whole, I think.

Lobbying hard for The Doomed City, which imo is on a level with Kafka's best stuff.

Bold claim.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ
High-Rise by J.G. Ballard
The Autumn Of The Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquéz
The Chain Of Chance by Stanislaw Lem
Correction by Thomas Bernhard
W Or The Memory Of Childhood by Georges Perec
Women As Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek

Gonna go with High Rise though there's plenty of great stuff.

JR is the one I'd like to read, and also re-read The Female Man.

Danny the Champion of the World and Salem's Lot are two of the most important books of my childhood, High Rise of my 20s.

I re-read Salem's Lot a couple of years back and it scared the bejesus out of me. I think I'll vote for that.

Would be nice to think I'll ever get around to JR.

The Female man is angry, excoriating, experimental, a pinnacle of feminist SF.

The Dead Father & Correction are two very funny books that I loved reading. Will wait to see which one gets less love here (probably Barthelme?) and throw it a vote.

As always, there are several I still want to read, by writers I've read, and don't remember Salem's Lot well enough--think I'll go with Rumble Fish as Lifetime Achievement Oscar.

JR, Rumble Fish, and Willard are the only ones I've read— going to sit this one out, because I remember not really enjoying any of them.

haven't finished JR and haven't read the rest... suspect the thomas bernhard is bangin'

Correction & JR were where my eye was drawn right away: being bombarded by one voice vs dozens. I gather Gaddis’s last book is a sort of tribute to Bernhard too.

Loved the dead father & high rise in my youth, never revisited - gonna give this to bernhard

See The Old Lady Decently by B.S. Johnson

This is massively underrated in the Johnson canon imo. Chunks of disparate stories winding together, frequently autobiographical, sometimes more abstract, very often moving.

The Perec also a contender but BSJ wins.

I have never read See The Old Lady Decently.

Fair number of books l like on here but W or the Memory of Childhood wins by a country mile.

Ok, gonna get into more detail re: The Doomed City.

The book follows the progress of the protagonist, who moves from the very bottom of his society (trash removal) to the highest levels of its bureaucracy. This is not due to his own merit or even connections, but because the whole of society is actually an Experiment conducted by outsiders - perhaps aliens - who move individuals from role to role following no logic discernable to them. There is also no consensus on what said Experiment is supposed to be about, or what it's for - some actually believe that it has already failed, some believe that it has been abandoned and they are continuing with no actual oversight.

This is of course an allegory for the Soviet Union, but the fact that the authors purposefully made the cast of characters international, including an American, makes me think that they were also grasping at something more universal concerning modern life.

I have never read See The Old Lady Decently.

I started reading it a few weeks ago and realized I'd read it before and didn't like it then either.

Booooooooooooo.

You can't win 'em all.

I was saying booooryan johnson

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Write-in vote for Edward Abbey's "Monkey-Wrench Gang".

Correction.

Humboldt's Gift stars promisingly and ends hilaroiusly but the middle is a slog.

Yeah, I liked the beginning, but didn't make it through the middle---maybe I'll try again, now that I've read the Original Humboldt, Delmore (some of whose best stories seem like they may have encouraged some of Bellow's best).

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1976

Write-in for How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup :)

Very little consensus here.