This has to be Invisible Man - a powerful and often depressing novel about race in America that is also endlessly inventive in its style and tone. Sad Ellison didn't do that much after it, but also kinda makes sense, like he just poured everything into this major work. Also a debut novel!
I remember feeling a strong need to wash after reading The Killer Inside Me, this is not meant as a judgement on the book either way.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 22 March 2021 11:56 (three years ago) link
surprised at how many of these I have read (6 - compared to 0 for several years in the 40s)
― Bastard Lakes (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, 22 March 2021 11:57 (three years ago) link
This is one of those tough ones with a few very dear books to me. Kneejerk and probably correct choice is Invisible Man but I have much love for Go and need to think about the whole list a bit more
― scamp til you're damp (Noodle Vague), Monday, 22 March 2021 12:26 (three years ago) link
Lot of good ones here (Wise Blood, Charlotte’s Web, Old Man and the Sea, Price of Salt, Excellent Women, but it has to be Invisible Man.
― horseshoe, Monday, 22 March 2021 13:00 (three years ago) link
Excellent Women would probably be my number 2.
― horseshoe, Monday, 22 March 2021 13:01 (three years ago) link
Way too many I haven't read on this list, but it's gotta be Invisible Man.
― pomenitul, Monday, 22 March 2021 13:20 (three years ago) link
east of eden was my first favorite book of all time!!! i haven't read it since. invisible man def the best thing i've read here. shout out to my man vasily grossman though (i haven't read stalingrad)
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, 22 March 2021 14:15 (three years ago) link
Argh, this is a year full of books I should have read (either b/c they're "important" somehow or because they're on my never ending to-read list), but I've only actually read the kidlit here, and none of them are particular favourites.
― emil.y, Monday, 22 March 2021 18:00 (three years ago) link
The film of Wise Blood was my favourite film for some time, but I've still never got round to reading it. I'm so bad at keeping up.
― emil.y, Monday, 22 March 2021 18:01 (three years ago) link
I haven't thought about Hemingway for a long time but a student teacher used a passage of The Old Man and the Sea the other day and I felt quite moved by it. Not sure I'd revisit but it has a particular energy I'd forgotten about. I'll probably go Wise Blood.
I need to sort my shit out and read Invisible Man.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 22 March 2021 18:24 (three years ago) link
I am committed to disliking Hemingway because of his whole deal as a person, and I can appreciate that he was a good writer without him being at all my thing, but Old Man in the Sea is perfect
― horseshoe, Monday, 22 March 2021 18:25 (three years ago) link
Lol *and the sea
― horseshoe, Monday, 22 March 2021 18:26 (three years ago) link
The student teacher was using the Old Man under the Sea so the kids could work up description using figurative language. I'm sure wholesome old Ernest would have loved it.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 22 March 2021 18:29 (three years ago) link
I've read six of these. All of them good to some degree. Invisible Man sits at the top.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Monday, 22 March 2021 18:52 (three years ago) link
Player Piano by Kurt VonnegutWise Blood by Flannery O'ConnorThe Killer Inside Me by Jim ThompsonThe Borrowers by Mary Norton
I genuinely can't make a decision here, I might have to pick a short straw or something.
― a sad robot dancing alone in the corner of a suburban disco (Matt #2), Monday, 22 March 2021 22:06 (three years ago) link
I might be tempted to vote for later Vonnegut, but I don't think he had really hit his stride yet with "Player Piano". "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is one of the better Narnia books, but it's not quite in the top tier for me, which would consist of "Wise Blood", "Invisible Man" and "Charlotte's Web".
― o. nate, Monday, 22 March 2021 22:18 (three years ago) link
Due credit to a grad school professor who in the late '90s assigned Grossman when he was impossible to find outside a library.
I prefer other Pyms and lemonade. My favorites:
Wise Blood Invisible ManCharlotte’s WebA Buyer's Market
But I may award this to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: the most consistently surprising Narnia novel, sustaining its Odyssey structure.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 March 2021 22:45 (three years ago) link
Hemlock And After by Angus Wilson -- decent novel, startlingly forthright about queerness for its time
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison -- stone-cold masterpiece
The Natural by Bernard Malamud -- I cannot stand baseball but I still found this gripping
The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola -- another stone-cold masterpiece, and quite a unique work stylistically and with a vivid, strange worldview where the border between life and death is less significant than crossing the road
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor -- ANOTHER stone-cold masterpiece, fucking hell, 1952 was a good year
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White -- ANOTHER stone cold masterpiece, but this time, you know, for kids!
Go by John Clellon Holmes -- the only Beat novel I would unreservedly recommend to other humans
The Groves Of Academe by Mary McCarthy -- fun and bitchy
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson -- beautifully pitched bit of horribleness, one of his best books
The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway -- this is probably his best work, short enough to not show too many of his flaws, no female characters to be written about embarrassingly
The Price Of Salt by Patricia Highsmith -- slightly uncharacteristic of her books plotwise, but a stylish minor masterpiece
Beat Not The Bones by Charlotte Jay -- actually really good crime novel about Australians in Papua New Guinea (then an Australian protectorate), very atmospheric and vividly drawn
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym -- one of her darker books, and all the better for it
The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton -- the first Gorse book, hugely funny and creepy
A Many-Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin -- interesting but dated interracial-romance-and-the-resulting-prejudices novel
Men At Arms by Evelyn Waugh -- the first Guy Crouchback novel, his most three-dimensional and likeable character, a genuinely excellent book
The Sound Of His Horn by Sarban -- lurid alternate-history Nazis-won novel about fascist having hunting parties where they chase naked women through the wilderness; better than this makes it sound
The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis -- one of the good Narnia books
Les Animaux dénaturés by Vercors -- weird but recommended little SF novel about bioethics
Mount Analogue by René Daumal -- unfinished, but a lot of fun; surrealist parody of Great Expedition accounts, to find a previously undiscovered mountain bigger than any other on the face of the Earth
The Financial Expert by R.K. Narayan -- Narayan was almost always quietly brilliant, as here
The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino -- man gets cut in half by a cannonball, both halves continue to lead their now separate lives; charming and clever
Normally I'd vote for Ellison, but Tutuola's book is such a unique and wonderful thing I have to go for that.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Monday, 22 March 2021 23:39 (three years ago) link
The Daumal is the one I want to read the most of this lot, tbh. At least partly b/c of another ilx0r's twitter handle.
― emil.y, Monday, 22 March 2021 23:52 (three years ago) link
I only read it a few weeks ago, it was very enjoyable.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, 23 March 2021 00:26 (three years ago) link
It’s a lot of fun, I heard of it first via Daniel Pinkwater recommending it in in Lizard Music.
― JoeStork, Tuesday, 23 March 2021 01:02 (three years ago) link
I still wanna read these---as wiki sez:Juneteenth is Ralph Ellison's second novel, published posthumously in 1999 as a 368-page condensation of over 2,000 pages written by him over a period of 40 years.[1] It was originally written without any real organization, and Ellison's longtime friend, biographer and critic John F. Callahan, put the novel together, editing it in the way he thought Ellison would want it to be written.
The fuller version of the manuscript was published as Three Days Before the Shooting... on February 2, 2010. And Flying Home: and Other Stories and still haven't read the essays, Shadow and Act. But I'll start with Juneteenth.
― dow, Tuesday, 23 March 2021 18:14 (three years ago) link
Flying Home is wonderful.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, 23 March 2021 22:27 (three years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.
― System, Wednesday, 24 March 2021 00:01 (three years ago) link
Learned in the LRB that the happy ending of The Price Of Salt was editorial meddling and not Highsmith's initial intent.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 24 March 2021 11:30 (three years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.
― System, Thursday, 25 March 2021 00:01 (three years ago) link
Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1953
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 25 March 2021 12:12 (three years ago) link