Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1930

It Walks by Night is creepy fun, but Carr got a lot better over the next few years.

As noted, The Maltese Falcon is essential for the Flitcraft parable.

Murder at the Vicarage is a solid illustration of why Marple > Poirot.

I can't really think of the Dos Passos as separate from the rest of the U.S.A. trilogy.

As I Lay Dying, shifting toward the other end of the deep South class spectrum from The Sound and the Fury, is faster, funnier, more horrifying, and his most bravura display of modernist narrative technique ... probably the best Faulkner novel to start with.

Was just about to check if dos Passover was in USA. In which case I read it as part of that but that was a few decades back.

Have read Maltese Falcon too. Which is good.

Want to read the Langston Hughes too. Not sure how much prose he wrote seemed to live an interesting life though.

Totally agree w Brad C, will go w AILD, although yeah Maltese Falcon is really good and The Defense, about a chess prodigy gradually melting down, was one of my favorite books in high school and prob still a good place to start w VN, tight and vividly layered, eerie and funny.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.

Had to vote for Faulkner.

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1931

Pkatoniv's The Foundation Pit was published in 1930 apparently. Would've gone for that, though Faulkner is v fine

*Platonov