Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1980

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.