Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novel Of The 1920's

The first novel I read with photos and art. It blew 19-year-old me away.

My favorite is The Magic Mountain, a magical philosophical novel where the reader becomes central to the story

The Magic Mountain. I reread it last year, it still holds up and is miles beyond anything else he has written (Buddenbrooks, Dr Faustus, even Death in Venice being all tedious to some extent).

If I had a triple vote, I would have cast the others towards Age of Innocence and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

There are only four I haven't read (including the Faulkner).

Top picks I would add to the list are Svevo (Zeno's Conscience), Zamyatin (We), Mofolo (Chaka), Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog)... Super rich decade

My adds would be Henry Green's Blindness and Living.
My friends and I, boys and girls, read Lady Chatterly's Lover in high school, agreed that it was trey sweet as well as hot, age-appropriately to us--then we went to college and had to read some of his other novels.

But he did have a way of turning up, with some short stories, travel writing (as Alfred mentioned recently), also relating to/getting excited about what he read as rebellious nullity in early Hemingway---also some very DH pomes, like this one from the Mott gatefold LP:

A Sane Revolution
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.

Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.

Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.

Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.

Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!

I've only read Psmith and Decline. I didn't like Decline, don't enjoy Waugh, and Psmith is one of my favourite Wodehouses, so I don't feel embarrassed to vote for it (even though it's likely not the best book here).

Psmith is unusual for Wodehouse, in that he has some measure of moral self-awareness, as opposed to being a likeable idiot -- but he's still a very memorable character. I wish there were more Psmith books.

Psmith is a perfectly creditable choice among these books. It's a pinnacle within the works of a master.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

Wharton a surprise, but I guess she already won one of these.

Glad I went with Breton

Could I read the Psmith novels in any order like the Jeeves series?

Yes.

Psmith first appears as a secondary character in some hard-to-find early Wodehouse novels that center around a fictional English public school called Wryken which spend most of their attention on a clean, upstanding young cricket player named Tom. By accident my first Wodehouse novel was Mike at Wryken, because my local public library had an ancient re-bound copy and most of the other Wodehouse were checked out. Later on Wodehouse realized Psmith was pure gold and started to feature him in novels of his own. I'm glad I first glimpsed him in his embryonic form.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novel Of The 1930's

Go with "Leave it to Psmith" first, it really is wonderful and stands alone. The others are lesser but still fun, especially "Psmith, Journalist".

Checked it out of the library.

it's also a Blandings Castle novel, which is a rich seam to say the least

My assumption is that everything from the mid-1910s up to (and including) "Joy in the morning" is worth checking out, and everything that comes after is... variable. I haven't read "Mating Season" though.

I enjoyed Uncle Fred In Springtime. Uncle Fred is to the manor born, and alarmingly wants to help, thus approaching a Bizarro World Jeevesdom.