Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1950

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury -- people love this and love Bradbury; I do not and do not

Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym -- lots of prickly fun but I will never care enough about who the new vicar is

The Drowning Pool by Ross MacDonald -- top-drawer PI writing

Strangers On A Train by Patricia Highsmith -- one of the great crime novels, absolute masterpiece

Women's Barracks by Tereska Torrès -- haven't read this, but an extremely porny-covered edition of this was the only interesting book available to my grandmother on the communal shelves when she had to spend a month recovering from a fall in an assisted living place

Helena by Evelyn Waugh -- easily his worst novel, and even worse than the travel writing

The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis -- still haver a lot of affection for this, despite the ill-considered world-building; its scary and thrilling bits genuinely work, despite Lewis's many failings as a writer

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns -- funny and horrible; the weird writing style came out partly because the editor refused to fix Comyns's spelling on the grounds that it fit the voice of the character, which made her incredibly embarrassed when the book came out

The Four Chambered Heart by Anais Nin -- Nin, Nin, doing her thing; does anyone read her any more?

Barabbas by Par Lagerkvist -- brilliant book, a man on the edge of an astonishing world-changing event spends the rest of his life trying to deal with what the hell happened

The Drinker by Hans Fallada -- downbeat minor masterpiece

The Judge And His Hangman by Friedrich Durrenmatt -- pleasantly oddball crime novel

Thirst For Love by Yukio Mishima -- great crazy stuff from a loon

Torn between Highsmith, Comyns and Legerkvist here.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I do love me some Martian Chronicles, but don't feel like I've read enough of the other options to vote for it. The only other one I've read is Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe, which I last read probably when I was about 10 years old. I do still have fond memories of it. I'd say it packs more suspense, mind-bending fantasy, pathos and chills than say Harry Potter, to use a more recent example of popular children's fantasy (grumpy old man alert: this opinion is based solely on overhearing the Harry Potter audiobooks which my son listens to, I haven't read it myself).

I like Bradbury but often feel like a little of him goes a very long way. The Martian Chronicles, though, I would probably vote for if only for the story "Mars is Heaven" which scared the absolute shit out of me as a kid and to be honest still does.

but don't feel like I've read enough of the other options to vote for it. Even if I've read only one in a given year, as has happened several times with these polls, and I really really like it, I'll vote for it, no regerts. But there are several years, like this one, where I haven't read any books on the list--the authors, o hell yes, but not these particular books, or not all the way through, or sometimes I think I did read it, or read about, but it didn't make enough of an impression to stan for.

Feels like cheating to call The Martian Chronicles a novel. didn't stop me voting for it though.

The three Comyns novels I’ve read have been remarkable (Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was definitely the most outright enjoyable) and I’m still a bit wary of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. The Martian Chronicles appears to be the only one I’ve read, though I have a copy of Some Tame Gazelle lying around.

I like to think it is a testament (no pun intended) to my lack of religious instruction (or maybe lack of paying attention, I did to go C of E schools) that I never knew what the fuck was meant to be going on at the end of The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe.

Yeah, being raised atheist and approaching the book from a Tolkien fan perspective the religious subtext flew over my head, too - ok so Aslan comes back from the dead, big whoop, so do most Marvel characters.

Ha, yeah, I totally failed to get any religious allegory out of TLTWATW (tl; twat w?). He's a big cat and he's got superpowers, that was pretty cool to my kid brain.

I don't remember if I connected it to religious allegory, but I do remember it made me feel uncomfortable because of the huge guilt trip the book laid on Edmund (was that his name?) for BETRAYING Aslan, when from my perspective he was a kid who'd been drugged by an adult and none of this was his fault.

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

Booooooo!

i went with "the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe," which i first read when very young and have always loved in spite of everything. as i've gotten older the flaws of the narnia books have gotten harder for me to overlook. i can see why tolkien didn't care for them: narnia doesn't have the solidity of middle-earth, where you can come back from a quest and visit the pub you left behind a thousand pages ago to find it more or less unchanged, and finally find the pony you were tearfully parted from eight hundred pages ago. narnia is a place where it can be winter for hundreds of years but animals still have no trouble finding food. narnia is, basically, whatever lewis felt like writing about. and the central concept of the books crumbles apart if you try to take it seriously: whatever else aslan is, he is not much like the jesus of the gospels. if lewis really thought he was, that's baffling to me. 

and yet he came up with so many indelible, dreamlike images: the snowy wood in the wardrobe, the faun with the packages, the witch on her sledge, aslan on the stone table, the vanishing white stag. and lewis's obsession with the potential evil lurking in our most ordinary actions, which only annoys me in his apologist writings, is one of the things that makes some of his fiction great to me. the passage where edmund tries to convince himself that he is doing the right thing in betraying his siblings, fails to do so, and yet somehow can't make himself turn back, has haunted me all my life. 

Yeah, I very much expected Lewis to win this one, actually - I guess ILX is always a little less British/anglophilic than it is in my mind.

I remember rereading TLTW&TW on a plane and tearing up a bit at the part where Lewis explains that, in Narnia, no one would ever be blamed for crying. Mind you I have plenty of little embarassing moments like that, I tend to well up a lot when reading on planes. Must be the air pressure.

Anyway:

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1951