Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1995

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