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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
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