Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1934

The Library of America Complete Novels of Dashell Hammett is reasonably priced for quality physicality, and of course they always go back to the original text, avoiding mistakes in reprints---but, you can find copies of this 1965 completion (which I read in the 70s, and my local library still has that copy; it's durable) in Condition: Good starting at $4.00 on the site of a certain Empire, for inst:

The Novels of Dashiell Hammett - [Contents: Red Harvest -- the Dain Curse -- the Maltese Falcon -- the Glass Key -- the Thin Man] Hardcover – January 1, 1965-New York; Knopf; 1st Edition in this form
Smart to alternate the stronger and lesser-but-enjoyable novels like that, ending w pizazz of The Thin Man.

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And a lot of his stories, incl. novellas, I think, have since been excavated, but I've only read a couple (pretty good).

So much stuff in this list I have seen in adaptation but not read. I think I Claudius might be the only one I’ve read (certainly the only one I’ve hand bound in red leather). I remember the BBC series not the book, though.

Love to read Cain, Hammett. Read half of Laxness, which I'd like to give another go this year.

I've read Rhys, which is great but not voting for it.

Independent People is the greatest Laxness novel I've read, but it is easily the grimmest, darkest and most emotionally challenging. It hearkens back to Icelandic sagas and their familiar intimacy with endless winter, struggle and death.

Tender is the Night approximates a messy double album: bad ideas, chapters you'd discard or heavily rewrite, but I love its flawed splendor.

I love Tender is the Night! Definitely flawed, but so beautiful in parts! Makes me sob.

I was prepared to vote for An Ordinary Life, which is the third part of Karel Capek's Three Novels (I voted for the first part, Hordubal, last time), but it's not here. I really cannot recommend this book highly enough.

I've read it four or five times, most recently about six years ago; I'm sure the Nicole parts I'd find most troublesome, almost as much as Fitz's insistence that Dick Diver had SO MUCH PROMISE DO YOU SEE. But those Nicole passages, the few from her POV, are illuminating; he never condescended to the caprices and longings of his women.

Yeah, it's a must for Fitz headz. Also worth a read: Calvin Tomkins' Living Well Is The Best Revenge, about awes expats Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose cushy family home was a salon and who were a major inspiration for TITN (well Dick and Nicole are kind of in there between Gerald and Sara and Scott and Zelda, I take it). Gerald was a proto-Pop Artist, in the 30s, if not the 20s or earlier---been a long time since I read it---the Modern Library edition, like the earlier, features some excellent paintings, also a new preface by Tomkins and revised last chapter

Oh yeah, here's one of his paintings on the cover:

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You really have to see it up close to get it, but that gives an idea.

Tender... is fairly long and uneven, double-LP like Alfred says, so prob not the one I'd want to start with---think for me it was either Tales of the Jazz Age or Gatsby---but once you're hooked, go for it. A hot mess can be pretty, you know, hot.

i struggled with pendragon legend, having loved journey into moonlight, but maybe i should give it another go. i did not find the comedy comic.

several good genre novels here, murder on the orient express, the nine tails with its fenland mood, the plague court murders, marred only by Carter Dickson being Carter Dickson (Merrivale) instead of John Dickson Carr (Fell).

Jeeves is wonderful ofc, Despair and iirc Coot Club also good, tho the only Ransome i really fuck with these days is We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.

Despair itself creates some peripheral but nagging questions of text. 1934 was the publication of the original Russian novel, Отчаяние. He then translated it later, as one of his first forays into English, and ofc its his *English* language with which as a teenager i fell in love. Perhaps it was only the ability of him as an author to reach deeply into his intentions in the original text and ensure the melody of the English expressed them. So as a landmark in Nabokov’s Englishing of his Russian novels and his aesthetic it’s significant. Except the original translation was i think lost in the war, so Nabokov translated it *again* much later, after his English approach was much more developed, and that is the text i read as a teenager. So what am i voting for if it cote for it here? All v Nabokovian (and slightly Boregsian). There is no essence, just bifurcating images in a set of mirrors.

I don't have much to add about Independent People aside from the fact I'll vote for it.

"A Coin In Nine Hands" was my first Yourcenar, I suppose twenty years ago now, and I loved it then and must read it again. I remember it being woozy and beautiful but I was in the middle of a months-long illness so who knows?

"The Song of the World" is my favourite Giono of the three or four I've read, it really hums with a kind of joy, and that plays well with the unease and confusion of the modern creeping in to what is an ancient way fo life. I'm surprised the current-is fashion for reading rural fiction about shepherds and whatnot doesn't seem to have meant a moment for Giono.

All of these extensively covered on the Harvill thread, of course.

I was prepared to vote for An Ordinary Life, which is the third part of Karel Capek's Three Novels (I voted for the first part, Hordubal, last time), but it's not here

Time for everyone to start checking if their future faves have English language wikipedia entries and, if not, to create them!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1935

you pervs

Tropic of Cancer is a difficult book to place on its merits, because its major merit applied with greatest force to the world in which it first appeared and as the world has changed since then, those merits have lost all their power and most of their value. Most of what's left of ToC for contemporary readers is Miller's egotism and crudity. Orwell's review of ToC is worth revisiting, if only to re-situate it in its time and place, under the light of a very perceptive critic. Orwell liked and appreciated it, largely because he saw Miller as the only author of his time who was legitimately happy.