Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1920

Glad I voted for Proust in the previous one, so I can vote for Fitzgerald's best novel here with a clear conscience.

Seven hunchbacks, in this economy???

Funny that Remarque, Rolland, Fitzgerald and Christie all arrive right on cue for the 1920's.

Voted Wharton.

That first Bulldog Drummond is chauvinistic and frothing-at-the-mouth anti-German but it has does have a pulpy energy that kept me entertained.

Yeah. Two Rolland's no less (Clerambault clearly my favourite). I enjoyed Chéri, too. Could never get with Renard. xp

I'm expecting myself to do a little better in terms of number of books read from the '20s, but obviously not yet, sigh.

Dream Novel = Traumnovel = Eyes Wide Shut innit?

thought i would have read a few of these, only one i think I have done is Dr Dolittle.

Have seen a few films of things though

think I have these 2 unread A Voyage To Arcturus by David Linsday
The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton

surprised Baroness Orczy is there cos I thought she was decades earlier. THought she was actually a writer frm an earlier century

may have read Cheri though.
picking up books from charity shops etc out of step with my reading speed. Know I read one by her and i think it was that

Orczy's been going since 1899, tho no one has ever commented on her selections in these before. At the risk of sounding too much like the UK pol thread regular I am, I have little interest in reading about the daring adventures of some counter-revolutionary toff. I do enjoy writing out her name tho because it has orc in it.

I liked the film well enough, but I didn't realize until reading the book that The Age of Innocence is comic (or at least, heavily ironized)!

I bought Women in Love on holiday, and thought that I should read The Rainbow first for background. I ended up loving The Rainbow, and thinking of Women in Love as a long appendix, where all the themes have become heavily, wearily underlined.

I'm going to start on The Guermantes Way when the snow comes.

Boringly: Proust, yet again.

"The Intermittences of the Heart" is one of the absolute high points of the novel for me.

Alf's Button is quite a title.

This is Wharton for me.

These polls are interesting reminders of how many popular novels are almost totally forgotten.

I haven’t read any of these as per, but the poll made me remember I have Migrations by Miloš Crnjanski sitting on my bookshelf upstairs and I need to read it already. Thanks!

I could totally do a 'bands/artists with one special album that will always mean the world to you' with Fitzgerald. Not read anything other than the Gatsby and, because it is the godhead, I am basically scared to even try.

Pain and Suffering sounds like a fun read! The author listed above is actually its publisher, it's the "first modern Indonesian novel", you learn something new every day...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azab_dan_Sengsara

The Sinclair Lewis book was the best selling book of 1921, the Wharton the 4th best selling.

Fitzgerald's best novel here

challop of all challops! conventional wisdom that FSF finds himself with Gatsby is correct

Anyway it's Wharton for me though I've read almost nothing else on this list, there are few novels of the era I like more that aren't other Wharton novels

Also I'm intrigued about whether it's a tower in which seven hunchbacks are roommates or whether it's a literal acrobatic act where seven hunchbacks stand one on the next's shoulders and sing and tell jokes

Whartons's novel is so devastating that when I reread in 2017 I had to put it down every dozen pages to catch a breath.

ok that's next on my list.

Yeah think I'll go w that over The Guermantes Way, which is best for Charlus, later for the rest of his fucking family and their 100 closest friends etc. Not that some of it isn't brill etc but still.

Re:Orczy - she's an odd one because she's absolutely terrible in every possible way - she's cliched, her characters have no discernable motivation and make no sense, her politics are awful, she has no idea how to write dialogue so her characters mostly walk around gardens by moonlight being too deep in their feelings to talk, she recycles bits of prose that were bad to start with - and yet her books are kind of entertaining.

The Great Impersonation is also a good one if you are looking for an adventure novel that is dumb and bad but also kind of fun. I got really into reading that kind of book on Project Gutenberg when I was in France fifteen years ago and had limited access to books in English.

Wharton, though there are at least 4 or 5 other very good things here.

Dream Room is not Dream Novel, which is by Schnitzler and older than this.

It's a terrible title, but The Metal Monster is excellent weird SF, mixing Haggard/Burroughs adventure with an eerie vision of alien distributed intelligence ... some of the visionary set pieces are startlingly out of scale with the human characters.

Apparently a favourite of Lovecraft too.

AKA A Merritt, a master of effects, knowing how to ride the flow of his visions and interests---also an editor, and all in all I think of him as like a healthier, incl. longer-lived, though maybe less compelling Poe---if you like him, also check, on this list, maybe even more fan-renowned outcat classick A Voyage To Arcturus by the elusive David Lindsay, who reads like more of a visionary-as-campy-crackpot, of a kind Lovecraft may have felt drawn to as well.

Wharton or Kristin Lavransdatter here

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I think I’ve only read this side of paradise but I love it. it introduced me to the word “autochthonous” which I have since encountered basically only in the medical literature (specifically infectious diseases)

Gene Wolfe uses it a bit.

Harold Bloom was famously a big fan of Voyage to Arcturus: “I have read it literally hundreds of times, indeed obsessively I have read several copies of it to shreds.” The much-shredded book has, he says, “affected me personally with more intensity and obsessiveness than all the works of greater stature and resonance of our time.”

challop of all challops! conventional wisdom that FSF finds himself with Gatsby is correct

― Guayaquil (eephus!), vrijdag 27 november 2020 19:15 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Guilty as charged :) I know it's not a popular opinion, and 'This Side of Paradise' certainly has its flaws, but it's my fave of him, and I find it eternally re-readable. Gatsby 'perfect' and fully formed, with this one he's still finding his way, which appeals to me.

Read Cheri earlier this year and it's ✔️✔️✔️

I was a bit hesitant to vote Voyage to Arcturus - it's singularly and impressively strange but I haven't read it in years and its advocates oversell it a bit (tho' this could be my allergy to allegory - even a cosmic-gnostic Bunyan can't quite get me over the taste coming through). Did vote for it in the end because the few other books that I've read here seem a bit staid in comparison - I know how to read them.

I saw The Ancient Allan and assumed it must be Quartermain, now seeing its the 10th book about him. Hadn't realised how much of a pulp repeat character he was.

I read Cheri and The last of Cheri about ten years ago and I remember absolutely nothing, plot summary rings no bells and I was even surprised when I learned the title character is male :(

I apparently read Age Of Innocence a few years ago and same.

I saw the film a couple of decades ago. I know I picked up th ebook but haven't looked at it.

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1921

Midway through The Age of Innocence, it's hard going! Full of awful people who have used their wealth to incarcerate themselves inside a dreadful prison. There is a measure of irony in Wharton's prose which suggests some amusement in her gaze, mine is just one of horror.

Well it's a masterpiece obviously, May Welland gets a raw deal though. Would be interested to know others' thoughts on Newland and the ending - maybe I'm being harsh but I think it's another example of his selfishness and cowardice.