Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1995

one of these i will read the unconsoled and probably love it

one of these days*

PKF ftw

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
The Rings Of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
High Fidelity by Nick Hornswaggle
The Information by Martin Amis
Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
American Tabloid - James Ellroy
The Reader by Bernard Schlink

The Information I liked at the time but yeuch; similar with Marabou Stork Nightmares. This is between Pat Barker and Sebald really but I could talk myself into a vote for Ellroy.

I don't know if it's the best book, but I voted for Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) because I love it and have read it many times.

I like High Fidelity--or at least I liked it when I read it in '97 or thereabouts. What am I doing wrong?

it has a kind of contempt for people who are really into music, especially experimental music, it's kind of a self-loathing, but it gets generalised in an imo unforgivable way

too many 'kind of's, that's why I won't be appearing on any of these lists

Man, I really wasn’t reading contemporary fiction at this point.

“Blindness” is the only one I’ve read here, and I prefer “Seeing” so much more.

I am pretty sure I liked Behind The Scenes At The Museum. I can't remember if I read all of Reservation Blues or just a Granta excerpt.

lol @ the treatment of High Fidelity here

Knowing me, I am sure that tried to read the Gass but I don't think I got through it.

So Amis it is. A clumsy book in many respects but I remember that it made me laugh in spots, so it must have had some merit. It helps if you hate Amis as much as he hates himself. Bonus if you feel the same way about Julian Barnes, maybe? Dunno.

I think I read "High Fidelity" but not sure. I did read "The Information". I feel ambivalent about voting for it though I enjoyed it well enough at the time.

"Sabbath's Theater" was 1995(!) I would've voted for that.

What’s the best place to start with Amis?

I tried with “Money” maybe 10-15 years ago and couldn’t make it beyond 30-40 pages.

I thought The Rachel Papers and Time's Arrow were pretty good, aged about 15 or 16.

voting for American Tabloid because of how it blew my teenage mind

Blindness is good at making you feel like you can't see shit. I'm iffy about the book's metaphor of blindness for moral blindness which could be offensive to people who are actually blind.

I voted for northern lights a.k.a. the golden compass.

Rachel Papers is squicky in places but accurate, and def of its time. Time's Arrow is well-executed pomo trickery.

The Information is cranky but not a starting place. So: London Fields. Start there and then go to Visiting Mrs. Nabokov.

FWIW (not that anyone asked) I think Barnes's romps are better than Amis's. Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters are both good keep-in-the-bathroom browseable books. Same pleasures as Italo Calvino and Nicholson Baker: if you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.

Metroland and Rachel Papers are close in sensibility and may as well be the same book as far as I am concerned.

I was (obviously) v susceptible to this kind of book in the nineties. I can't imagine going back to them with an adult eye, but for a 90s white male burb SNAG they were the right thing for one's nightstand.

have only read Reservation Blues and Northern Lights. Has any Pelevin shown up on these polls yet

I like High Fidelity--or at least I liked it when I read it in '97 or thereabouts. What am I doing wrong?

I'd say a big part of the animosity, especially amongst British readers, is that it's a very average bloke-ish look at music fandom, not just in terms of being a straight white middle class male protagonist but also a certain skepticism against anything too artsy or high minded - remember the bit where he talks about having read a few big books and goes "they're about girls, right?" or something to that effect.

Another aspect is it's a book about a manchild finally getting it together that's super generous towards its manchild protagonist and views his previous terrible behaviour in relationships as just, like, steps in his self-actualization journey. Hornsby himself is quite scathing about this aspect of it these days.

Being honest though I read HF as a #teen and with no frame of reference for the relationship stuff I was just excited to read a novel featuring top5 lists and references to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys and depictions of that most impossibly glamorous of lives, working at a record shop.

"Sabbath's Theater" was 1995(!) I would've voted for that.

It was in the longlist but had to drop it to get to 50, alongside final novels by Iris Murdoch and Patricia Highsmith.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Melancholy is one of several amazing Fosse novels, although maybe not your obvious Fosse starter with its complicated conceit - a fictionalized first-person biographical story of a tortured Norwegian old master painter, boring inside his mind at his most fraught, around the time he was admitted to the asylum.

I was hoping Patrick McCabe's "The Dead School" would have been included. I think its his best.

Otherwise, I am voting for "American Tabloid".

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1996