Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1939

at swim-two-birds.

can pretend ive ever read a 1/10th of finnegans wake

It redefined the act of reading in some ways and nearly rendered 'front to back' moot, so that's not a reason not to vote for it imo (preferring O'Brien, however, totally is).

hm might have to side with Jimminy Catbin here but yes as Aimless says these are difficult books to put against each other

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O' Brien -- great book, but saving my vote for The Third Policeman which is even better

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler -- nobody needs to have me tell them how good this is, pt 1

Ask The Dust by John Fante -- another of my beloved failing writers in Hollywood classics

The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West -- brilliant dark comedy nastiness

The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck -- nobody needs to have me tell them how good this is, pt 2

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo -- nobody needs to have me tell them how good this is, pt 3

Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague De Camp -- read this about 2 weeks ago, it's fun time travel nonsense, frictionlessly moving through its plot

Pal Joey by John O' Hara -- I have a weakness for O'Hara, and his novellas are especially good

Tropic Of Capricorn by Henry Miller -- daft bugger

Happy Valley by Patrick White -- for Australians, this long-suppressed novel is like an A Country Practice storyline written by a genius

Coming Up For Air by George Orwell -- lesser Orwell, still very good

The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene -- another excellent Greene entertainment

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys -- nobody needs to have me tell them how good this is, pt 4

Goodbye To Berlin by Christopher Isherwood -- nobody needs to have me tell them how good this is, pt 5

The Mask Of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler -- one of the best Amblers, probably

Party Going by Henry Green -- absolute gem

What's Become Of Waring by Anthony Powell -- entertaining social comedy

Coup de Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar -- this is great, and ridiculously it's out of print

Beware Of Pity by Stefan Zweig -- his only full-length novel, I am a Zweig tragic, Michael Hofmann would not approve

Across The Black Waters by Mulk Raj Anand -- Indian soldiers in WW1; fascinating novel if stylistically undistinguished

Grapes of Wrath, but Day of the Locust is a great, nasty, bracing read.

Ulysses > Finnegans Wake

I should vote for Grapes of Wrath for its own merits and its extra-literary significance and because it reminds me of stories told by my father and uncles about doing migrant farm labor during the Depression, but it's not really my favorite here.

Jerusalem, If I Forget Thee has some scenes and passages that I've remembered for decades. The parallel storylines shouldn't work but somehow combine to give it the widest emotional range of any Faulkner novel.

The Ambler and Chandler novels are really fun. Anyone who hasn't read The Big Sleep should treat themselves, it's better than the Bogart/Bacall movie.

Agatha Christie doesn't get enough love. She's a powerhouse like Stephen King; the overabundance of books and some obvious weaknesses tend to conceal the merits of her best work. And Then There Were None is one of the trickiest of her mysteries, but to me it's best read as horror -- the ur-text for slasher movies and every other story in which an isolated ensemble is killed off one by one.

That's a really great take on ATTWN Brad!

Yes! Never occurred to me, but of course it is!

Really, I think what makes Christie so consistently readable, despite the thin characters and the mechanical plots, is that all her books have one foot in horror - not in the sense of meeting the genre conventions the way ATTWN does, but in the sense of atmosphere. Even when she's got Hercule Poirot investigating a death at a country house, or something equally gimmicky and by-the-numbers, the books are still suffused with this intense underlying feeling of horror that murder exists and that human actually do this to each other.

human beings, I meant to say

Embarrassed to say I've only read "Day of the Locust", which is as great as everyone is saying it is.

1939 saw publication of quite a few great books. It was a rich year for movies, too. Probably pure coincidence.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I read The Big Sleep to try to figure out why the movie is so confusing. The answer: The book covers two cases, one for each sister, Carmen and Vivian, and they don't intersect until late on. In the movie, Carmen's case got censored (it involved pornography) and cut down, leaving a lot of loose threads and a lack of structure. Also, Chandler fucked up regarding the death of the family's driver, heavily implying that it was murder in one chapter then never explaining who did it.

Which I think he realised working on the script.

If you want a more faithful adaptation you can always look at Michael Winner's horrible 70's version with the action relocated to London. But I wouldn't recommend you do so.

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

Ha! Did not expect Joyce to be beaten. In fairness this was a hellish year to poll.

Aw, no votes for Ask the Dust. I do love that book, but to be honest it never stood a chance in this company.

Yeah but agreed, it's still pretty sad it didn't get a single vote! I voted Sarraute, having thrown Fante a vote two years earlier, knowing he'd be up against some giants this year. But no mistake, Ask the dust is phenomenal.

Did not expect Joyce to be beaten.

The poll is for Favorite Novel, not Most Critically Admired and Academically Blessed. We are but human.

Apocryphal Anecdote Warning:

James Joyce was attending a party some time after Finnegans Wake had been published and a woman who had approached him, in reference to its famous multi-linguistic puns and structural impishness, asked him, "But Mr. Joyce, you don't expect us poor readers to spend the rest of our lives disentangling all these knots, do you?"

To which Joyce replied, "Yes. I most certainly do"

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1940

Thought the Joyce anecdote would be about a handshake request.

Remembering an all-time great from Kate Beaton:

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=32