Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1930

Not quite as impressive as 1929.

The Maltese Falcon is pretty awesome but also very similar to the John Huston adaptation which, y'know, has Bogart and Peter Lorre and such.

I read Cakes And Ale, remember almost nothing from it.

Voting Vile Bodies, which I remember being quite affecting.

Read The Rebels, Job and As I Lay Dying. Going for the latter.

I've never found a copy of that Kawabata otherwise I would've read it.

Faulkner for me. Good to see HG Wells still going strong.

Seems sort of wrong to have to compare Swallows and Amazons to As I Lay Dying; I voted Faulkner but the entire S&A series is perfect in its way.

I've read two.

Murder at the Vicarage: the first Miss Marple novel; I think this is the one that contains the goof that the murder scene was being watched by a gardener, and it's never explained how the murderer got by her unseen.

The Maltese Falcon: just watch the movie

Claude Cahun for the book as disorienting art object, doubly so when it purports to speak of the self. So not quite a novel, no, but all the more intriguing for it.

The Maltese Falcon does have the Flitcraft chapter, which doesn’t make it into the movie.

The Maltese Falcon: just watch the movie

Almost all the dialogue from the Huston/Bogart adaptation (I think there were two earlier ones that nobody watches or cares about, but they exist) is lifted verbatim from the novel. Huston deserves his reputation for being extremely good at translating his source material to a screenplay and then a finished film. The Maltese Falcon delivers about 95% of the novel, which is astounding.

It Walks by Night is creepy fun, but Carr got a lot better over the next few years.

As noted, The Maltese Falcon is essential for the Flitcraft parable.

Murder at the Vicarage is a solid illustration of why Marple > Poirot.

I can't really think of the Dos Passos as separate from the rest of the U.S.A. trilogy.

As I Lay Dying, shifting toward the other end of the deep South class spectrum from The Sound and the Fury, is faster, funnier, more horrifying, and his most bravura display of modernist narrative technique ... probably the best Faulkner novel to start with.

Was just about to check if dos Passover was in USA. In which case I read it as part of that but that was a few decades back.

Have read Maltese Falcon too. Which is good.

Want to read the Langston Hughes too. Not sure how much prose he wrote seemed to live an interesting life though.

Totally agree w Brad C, will go w AILD, although yeah Maltese Falcon is really good and The Defense, about a chess prodigy gradually melting down, was one of my favorite books in high school and prob still a good place to start w VN, tight and vividly layered, eerie and funny.

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How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.

Had to vote for Faulkner.

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Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1931

Pkatoniv's The Foundation Pit was published in 1930 apparently. Would've gone for that, though Faulkner is v fine

*Platonov