Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1980

The Twits is funny. A disgusting old married couple do everything within their power to kill each other but end up being done in by a bunch of animals.

Of course this year's list starts with the one Marilynne novel I haven't yet read---wonder if I could get through it before results are in? Gone with Butler several times. Yeah, Riddley Walker, The Name of the Rose would be worthy picks. But A Confederacy..., which seems to move out of the shadows of Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors, has always spoken to Southern me re the warped aspects of New Orleans as twisted portal to and from the old and less old South (from antebellum to Lee Harvey Oswald and the KKK--see also The Earl of Louisiana)---and to book hoarder-"scholar"me as well---and when the medievalist crackpot finally emerges from his nest, he finds followers, all agreeing," "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." This always (from the time of publication) did seem a bit prophetic, re the world beyond NOLA, and has seemed much more so in the Trump Age. All in deadpan, camera pan, grainy, smelly detail, though maybe I'm too sucked into what L. Rust Hills calls the Schlock of Recognition---so be it (would hold off 'til rapid read of the Marilynne, but just emerged from Library of America onionskin slab of Melville, not yet ready for another plunge).

i enjoy confederacy of dunces but it's also sort of not hard to see why it wasn't published during the author's lifetime. essentially a series of broad comic scenes in which the characters act according to how we expect them to act, perhaps somewhat overstaying their welcome by the end. a reasonably fun beach read but not really a great novel.

of the books ive read here the twits is my favourite

have had 'name of the rose' on my tablet for a long time but have been too daunted to read–is it worth the effort?

Housekeeping~Marilynne Robinson

name of the rose? my recall of it is that it's major merit is a deft transposition of standard detective genre tropes into a setting highly antithetical to them. it's entertaining, but requires a suspension of disbelief to accept its improbability. sort of a high class 'summer read'.

I would guess most of the books on this list require some suspension of disbelief.

lol

For me it finally winnowed down to Housekeeping and Human Voices. While the first of these is excellent and strikingly original, I went with the second; it was a book I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish and that pushed it to the top.

Naturally, the Eco.

Tough one

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
or
Waiting For The Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

Pretty different books. With Barbarians Coetzee fine-tuned that insanely catchy voice of his with the blunt, emphatic sentences. Housekeeping is its own thing entirely.

I remember Bourne Identity as a great page-turner, the perfect book to find on the shelf in a summer rental. Restaurant at the End of the Universe was my favorite of the Hitchhiker trilogy as I mentioned on a previous thread. A Month in the Country is a wonderful short novel with great atmosphere. But my vote goes to Confederacy of Dunces which I found hilarious, I guess more than many here did, and with a memorable protagonist.

confederacy is a book i kind of admire in many ways -- the dialogue is very sharp and unique and it is funny at least some of the time, if not quite as funny as it's obviously meant to be. but it really is just too long, by at least a hundred pages. and i'm still not sure what the reader is supposed to feel toward ignatius. the introduction compares him to don quixote, but i think he's more on the level of a minor simpsons character (maybe the comic book guy, who might well have been inspired by him): someone very entertaining in small doses but not someone you need to spend 400+ pages with. i can see why the original editor agonized over rejecting it but, finally, did.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Have only read Human Voices, A Month in the Country, and Riddley Walker, but it's Riddley Walker.

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

Much better than average participation in this one!

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1981

Yeah, and my one vote mattered, I guess.