Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1974

Will be very happy if Hearing Trumpet wins as the early returns suggest it may. I'm about due for a reread, actually....

Dhalgren for me. Totally changed me when I first read it.

Tough year, but going w Dog Soldiers (helps to have read it in the 70s)--wiki sez it well:
California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe, waits for artistic inspiration as a war correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. Also a thing in Easy Rider, and real life, often enough: Stone lifted from all over, but he wasn't wrong, social commentary-wise or in art and entertainment.

Converse involves a former friend, Ray Hicks, in the smuggling deal. Hicks will hide the heroin on the Merchant Marine vessel he works on when he ships from Vietnam to Oakland, California and deliver the dope to Converse's wife Marge in Berkeley, California. The novel's primary complication unfolds when Hicks arrives in the States and realizes that he was discovered before he arrived and is being aggressively followed. Unsure whether Converse was double-crossed by his suppliers or Converse himself betrayed him, Hicks elects to go on the run with the heroin, taking Marge as insurance. The novel's action follows Hicks and Marge's evasion of Converse and his suppliers, and Hicks's attempts to sell the dope, south through California to the desert.

Once an all-American marine, now a lone wolf, Hicks is a survivalist and an autodidact trying to apply in himself Zen Buddhism, martial arts and the philosophy of Nietzsche. Marge is a painkiller junkie and guilt-ridden mother who takes tickets at a porn theater because it is ironic; she presents herself as an advocate of freedom, both sexual and of speech. She had agreed with Converse to do the heroin deal. Their pursuer may intend to arrest them and keep the drugs off of the street, or allow his associates to kill them and keep the swag for himself, but no one can tell for sure. His thugs may be merely well-informed drug thieves or legitimately on the fringe of the law enforcement world.
Inspiration
Stone acknowledges having borrowed heavily[citation needed] from his experiences among the Merry Prankster milieu led by novelist Ken Kesey, with whom Stone became acquainted while he was a student in the graduate creative writing workshops at Stanford University. According to Gregory Stephenson, author of a number of Beat studies, the character of Ray Hicks was inspired by Beat Generation icon and Merry Prankster Neal Cassady — Hicks is "an idealized Cassady figure".[5] Numerous details from the novel are based on Cassady and his exploits[citation needed] and the environs of Ken Kesey's home in La Honda, California, an informal commune depicted in the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Allen Ginsberg.

Look at the Harlequins, said the Marathon Man

Lol

i love these polls lately bc i end up buying 2-3 books during every single one of them .....lol

def picking up dog soldiers and hearing trumpet

an idealized Cassady figure" To me, more of a streamlined Cassady figure, with some elements dropped (incl.the bi ones), others played up: a hyper-Cassady, not that the original wasn't plenty hyper.

Carrie is still a good read, longtime SK favorite

Dog Soldiers is a trip, and Wanderers is great

lots of good shit here

the hearing trumpet without a moment's hesitation

This is another one where realisation of who's a contemporary really hits: imagine a world with Stephen King, Leonora Carrington, Ishmael Reed, Vladimir Nabokov and John Le Carré co-existing.

Yeah--and Ballard and Delany and Le Guin and Highsmith and---

Another favourite from this year: Butcher's Moon by Richard Stark, the epic and bloody finale of the original Parker series.

This is maybe the strongest year yet (personally speaking)? No idea what to go for. Potentially: Baldwin, Dick, King, Ballard, Le Guin, Herbert...

I've always meant to read the Carrington. These threads are costing me a fortune.

just realised this list is missing The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, tsk.

Butcher's Moon by Richard Stark, the epic and bloody finale of the original Parker series. Yeah--- and he did come back, in Comeback(1997), and I recently read the last one, Dirty Money(2008), my first. What an asshole, but a number of striking (not always literally) moments, and he gets more interesting as he comes back into my head---oh and now I see John D. MacDonald is on here too--tough year.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Happy to see at least two other people itt have read "Alphabetical Africa"!

I read it just recently - I enjoyed it enough to want to read more abish but emil.y is otm about the colonialist aspect (& some other stuff that is a bit iffy)

This should prob be dhalgren just over carrington & le carré but voting for the last days of Louisiana red as I haven’t voted for Reed yet, it’s as good as mumbo jumbo & I read it first

Dog Soldiers is a cracking read

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

HI FIVE whoever else voted for Inverted World

Can I honestly say it is as good a novel as The Dispossessed? I cannot. But it's so weird and individual and I'm so glad it exists!

Wait Carrie shutout, are you kidding me??? That's a grave injustice.

Ditto The Forever War, pretty major year for SF though

Would watch a 1974 in lit doc or book like they do with years in music.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1975

Damn, I had a suspicion that Dhalgren would win this despite more talk about Carrington. Maybe I'll get round to reading it sometime, then.