Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1922

I feel like the spiritual quest with Tibetan overtones had taken off in the Germanosphere before Hesse put it out there tbf

One of the few years where I've not just read multiple books, but multiple ones that I would consider voting for. I haven't been on holiday just to celebrate any of the other books, though. (The tradition of Lad's Day is one dear to my heart)

He didn't single-handedly invent hippies, but it sure fell prey to the hippies from 40 years on.

hard to look beyond Diary of a Drug Fiend

― Uptown Top Scamping (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 December 2020 13:54 bookmarkflaglink

lol i won a prize for english literature at school, and ordered this as my prize to be awarded on a big assembly evening with all presents there because *i yam such a rebel*. embarrassing obv, and the book is you will be surprised to know crap.

The Prisoner gets to be pretty tiresome (basically a rehash of "Swann In Love," a long-ass rehash, esp. w The Fugitive) so I'll go w Ulysses, tho prob would have anyway. Those are the only two on here I've read.

Oh wait, I did read The Beautiful and Damned, but it's way behind Ulysses.

I have read:
The Adventures of Sally
Kai Lung's Golden Hours
The Secret Adversary
The Velveteen Rabbit
The Absolute at Large
Ulysses

Of those, Ulysses is the obvious winner, although Capek is one of my favorite writers and I'm sad that I'll have to wait a while before I can vote for him in one of these polls. (Since plays and short story collections aren't part of this.)

Yeah, the Capek is lots of fun--animists turn out to be right and so when the atom is split it releases raw GOD POWER which leaks out into the world and fucks everything up

Life And Death Of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair is quietly devastating and deeply excellent

The Mapp/Lucia books by EF Benson get raved about by people but I have never got on with them AT ALL

The Glimpses Of The Moon by Edith Wharton feels like Wharton not completely successfully trying to channel F Scott Fitzgerald

First time for these in a while where I have read three of the books so will put in a vote for The Prisoner, it's pretty insane. I love Proust a lot more than Joyce, though I'd love to spend time in the Finnegans Wake universe.

Other one was the Hesse, which I don't remember much about or even feel like revisiting.

An aside - it was obviously never in contention for me, but if you're a fan of quaint English murder mysteries, you could do a lot worse than the A. A. Milne. I was certainly surprised by it when I discovered it (this is the second time in a week that I will confess to surprise at a children's author doing something other than writing for children, I really should learn to give them more credit).

really? that’s interesting. will give it a go as i am a fan of qmms

I love Proust a lot more than Joyce

My man.

I'll also vote for The Prisoner. Absolute misery, but it can't all be flowers and madeleines.

I've technically read Ulysses in that I've read all the words, but I feel like I don't know it well.

i'm concerned that Ulysses won't landslide this now

i mean it doesn't matter but still

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. first christie book but not one that's well known or aged well i don't think. have any of the Tommy and Tuppence books had a life outside the books?

anyway, only one of the list i've read and i didn't enjoy it.

I don't think I would have ever finished Ulysses if I hadn't taken a class entirely devoted to it in my undergrad years. I'm glad I pulled through and it remains one of the most admirable literary monuments of all, but I don't *love* it and no doubt never will. There's just too much superhuman verbal virtuosity on display – even its flaws feel like they're not of this world, despite the deceptively mundane subject matter. Beckett, once past his early imitative phase, provided the perfect (because imperfect) corrective to the Joycean aesthetic.

spoiler example christie quote

“This gentleman is a Russian Bolshevik. We don’t want to shoot him, but it may be necessary. You understand?”

First time I read Ulysses I allowed myself to kind of float along with it, read some of it drunk, not worry too much if I missed stuff. Then came the academic readings of it. I think that way was much more satisfying than starting with an academic view, though I treasure my studies on it too. I do love it and I will be very upset if it doesn't win.

Ulysses is a bit like getting a tattoo with me: I keep intending to read it next year but I'm probably a bit scared and haven't found the necessary impetus. Like too many things in my life, I need someone to bring the mountain to me.

the enormous room is pretty good, i think. siddhartha was a decent read in high school. even as an adult i find the velveteen rabbit almost too sad to think about.

i wonder, pom, if you have to go thru a work phase on Ulysses to break thru to the pleasure of ignoring its theory phase. not at all sure that's true but i guess it was partly my experience, tho i started reading first, then theoried up, then went back to the pleasure of the absorbing funny down to earthness of it, which it really is, i swear

i mean i'm pretty sure by 1918 JJ knew it was all too much on one level. but there's a lot of levels

It's not so much the theory as the confidence in language's purportedly epiphanic powers or whatever. I tend to prefer writers for whom writing is a struggle and whose works bear the brunt of that struggle. With Joyce, there's something quasi Paganini-esque about the spectacle he conjures up – too much bedazzlement for comfort, too much visible (and audible) success. This is a reductive view, of course, but it's what leaps out at me when I'm reading him, from Dubliners onward.

no i'd never argue with somebody else's relationship to a thing, but there's two things i feel confident about: that Joyce realised at some point that language was writing beyond him, and that even if you strip that away Ulysses is the pinnacle of social realism

i have no meaningful conclusions to draw from those two thoughts

language was writing beyond him

Perhaps, but language also writes against itself, and there are very few traces of that movement in Joyce's work.

Ulysses as 'the pinnacle of social realism', however? Sure.

Yet it's worth pointing out that underlying cultural factors inflect our respective readings as well. There are a few extra degrees of geographical and historical separation between me and the world of Ulysses, as it were.

as far as language writing beyond him i guess i'm thinking more of Finnegans, but i think Joyce used to joke about its predictive power whereas i think what he might've meant, consciously or not, was he stumbled across a machine for generating meaning, which i'd trace back to the earlier work

i mean this also comes into areas of intentionality that i don't much care about but for a long time after i first wrassled FW i questioned the value of meaning

and he certainly made jokes about readers generating meaning during the gestation/publication of Ulysses, the stuff about professors endlessly dissecting it etc. the book isn't on trial, it's the abyss lol

but to reduce this to a personal thing, moments of Ulysses intrude on my life every week in the same way that moments of The Simpsons do

but also one day i need to have a proper swim in Proust

One day I'll reread Ulysses and will likely get far more out of it than I did at the ripe old age of 21.

Been a long time since I read it for a class---minus Bloomsday, also assigned, but I did alright on the test---I'd like to go back and try it with some commentaries now, but my take at the time was of X-Y axis: X being what vertical layers of classical reference and fluent phrasing brought to Y horizontal storyline, proceeding through day and night around town, axis itself the power of association, music and notation on a grid of how the mind works, mind of the author and characters, connective tissue: so, to me, it's multi-d social realism, proceeding from and via Dubliners and Portrait. Classical bits to an extent provided mainly an initial grid, points of departure, not really amounting to a major preoccupation. Not to say that commentaries couldn't point out something about this that I've missed---but if you have to have it pointed out to you, is it really part of the book, if you have to read something else to get it?? Well maybe, if it then settles into the way you re-read it, but see I wanted more of a cold reading, a blindfold test, always do.

Also supposedly he contacted people still in Dublin, had them check details, even measure, to make sure he was putting it all in accurately. So even if he got carried away sometimes, "language writing beyond him," there was that kind of grounding attempted.

So that was the appeal to young me: you can have it all! "Yes I will yes."

I think I've just voted in one of these for the first time.

Nailed on AA Milne vote there.

fwiw i did vote ulysses because i think it's wonderful. it's one of those books which whenever i dip back into it i get *feels*... of place, language, thought, people, thinking and socialising, history. what a glorious exuberance of literature, thought and spirits.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Oh yes I read The Secret Adversary this year. It is quite a funny curio. The concept of Russian communism as basically a one man job that could be defeated. Thinking there must've been a ton of these red scare type books.

It is not better than The Prisoner or Ulysses though.

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1923

The Enchanted April is v good. Quite fantastical - not in terms of elves or unicorns, just what happens to the characters. It's not entirely lightweight, there is good, if implicit, anti patriarchy stuff, and some strong character work, but if you fancy some pure feelgood escapism I'd recommend it.

I had fun making these.

Missing pom and LBI.

yes

These polls were so great. I was hoping someone would take the winners of each year and do decade ones but...

I looked at the 1929 recently as I'm reading Red Harvest. Goddamn there are too many books and not enough days.

Oh all right.

That's the spirit!