Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1951

Lots of Big Beasts in this one.

A Catcher In The Rye might actually be underrated now, after decades of serving as everyone's lazy go-to for why white boy lit is bad.

I included the Frank L. Baum just to let you guys know that, after all these decades, he is still at it and has been since he first showed up in these polls.

I love Catcher In The Rye, but it's up against Molloy here, so

Just for fun, the ILX 20th century canon so far:

1900-"Lord Jim", Joseph Conrad
1901-"Kim", Rudyard Kipling
1902-"Heart Of Darkness", Joseph Conrad*
1903-"The Call Of The Wild", Jack London
1904-"The Phoenix & The Carpet", E. Nesbit/"The Golden Bowl", Henry James
1905-"The House Of Mirth", Edwith Wharton
1906-"The Jungle", Upton Sinclair
1907-"The Secret Agent", Joseph Conrad
1908-"Anne Of Green Gables", Lucy Maud Montgomerey/"The House On The Borderland", William Hope Hodgson/"The Wind In The Willows", Kenneth Grahame/"Why did you spoil my life making me do my M. A.?", Amrit Keshav Nayak
1909- "Jakob Von Gunten", Robert Walser
1910- "The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge", Rainer Maria Rilke
1911- "Ethan Frome", Edith Wharton/"The Secret Garden", Frances Hodgson Burnett
1912- "A Princess Of Mars", Edgar Rice Burroughs
1913- "Swann's Way", Marcel Proust
1914- "Locus Solus", Raymond Roussel
1915- "The Rainbow", D.H. Lawrence
1916- "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", James Joyce
1917- "Summer", Edith Wharton/"Growth Of The Soil", Knut Hamson/"Jap Herron: A Novel Written From The Ouija Board", dictated by the spirit of Mark Twain/"Moonchild", Aleister Crowley/"Under Fire", Henri Barbusse**
1918- "My Antonia", Willa Cather
1919- "In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower", Marcel Proust
1920- "The Age Of Innocence", Edith Wharton
1921- "The Good Soldier Švejk", Jaroslav Hašek
1922- "Ulysses", James Joyce
1923- "Leave It To Psmith", P.G. Wodehouse
1924- "The Magic Mountain", Thomas Mann
1925- "The Trial", Franz Kafka
1926- "The Castle", Franz Kafka
1927- "To The Lighthouse", Virginia Woolf
1928- "Decline And Fall", Evelyn Waugh/"Nadja", André Breton
1929- "The Sound And The Fury", William Faulkner/"Berlin Alexanderplatz", Alfred Doblin
1930- "As I Lay Dying", William Faulkner
1931- "The Waves"m Virginia Woolf/"Night Flight", Antoine de Saint-Exupéry/"After Leaving Mr.Mackenzie", Jean Rhys
1932- "Journey To The End Of The Night", Louis-Ferdinand Céline
1933- "Man's Fate", André Malraux
1934- "Tender Is The Night", F. Scott Fitzgerald/"Tropic Of Cancer", Henry Miller/"Right Ho Jeeves", P.G. Wodehouse
1935- "Mr.Norris Changes Trains", Christopher Isherwood
1936- "Absalom, Absalom", William Faulkner
1937- "The Hobbit", J.R.R. Tolkien
1938- "Rebecca", Daphne du Maurier
1939- "At-Swim-Two-Birds", Flann O' Brien
1940- "Native Son", Richard Wright
1941- "Thomas The Obscure", Maurice Blanchot/"The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight", Vladimir Nabokov/"Mildred Pierce", James M. Cain
1942- "Put Out More Flags", Evelyn Waugh/"The High Window", Raymond Chandler
1943- "The Man Without Qualities", Robert Musil
1944- "The Horse's Mouth", Joyce Cary
1945- "Animal Horse", George Orwell
1946- "Titus Groan". Mervyn Peake
1947- "The Plague", Albert Camus
1948- "I Capture The Castle", Dodie Smith
1949- "1984", George Orwell
1950- "The Martian Chronicles", Ray Bradbury

* or "The Hound Of The Baskervilles" if you want to decry that as a novella
** all of them with an impressive one vote each

Molloy. I've read at least five of these so I feel informed enough to vote.

Baum died in 1919!

lol ah fuck, wikipedia lead me down an errouneus path, these were all written by his successors!

somewhat less impressive

Oof, this one's rough. I should go with either Molloy or Malone Dies but I think I'll save my Beckett vote for The Unnamable and/or How It Is. Otherwise, it's a toss-up between Gracq and Yourcenar, with a slight preference for the latter.

I loathed The Catcher in the Rye in my teens because Holden sounded like a phony himself and baseball elicits no emotional response from me whatsoever. Years later, I was frankly baffled to discover that it's long been held up as a classic tale of teenage rebellion. I wish!

One of the Onion's best moments imo:

https://www.theonion.com/bunch-of-phonies-mourn-j-d-salinger-1819571282

Wow, I've actually read a handful of these. Memoirs of Hadrian and The Catcher in the Rye are favourites.

I feel like it basically sums up my personality and aesthetic that I'm torn between Catcher and Molloy here

I'm glad that Why did you spoil my life making me do my M. A.? is in the ILX canon. Absolutely fundamental document for understanding the ILXor mindset.

i love The End of the Affair, but gotta vote Catcher here

i am perpetually irritated by those periodical twitter posts about how Catcher is terrible and shouldn't be taught to kids. i teach it every year, but i appreciate it even more as an adult than i did as a kid, when i liked it.

i am also fond of Camilla Dickinson and Ellen Tebbits, tbf. but none of them is Catcher

Yeah it rules but I also fully understand what gets up people's nose about it (and the same qualities are present in Salinger's other stuff too, I would say even more so in fact.) A great book it's totally OK not to like.

Triffids vs Hadrian for me. (A film I'd pay to see.)

everything is okay not to like, but the reasons given for disliking Catcher by adults who haven't read it since they were 13 indicate that they do not remember the book or did not understand the book.

xp

Holden sounded like a phony himself

the point of the book

There's something remarkable about the fact that few people seem to have a distanced reaction to it. It's very love or hate. (Though high school standards are often fraught in that way.)

no one can be an adult and avoid being a phony! also Holden knows he's a phony sometimes and hates himself for it!

Molloy, yes. I still had to double-check which one of the 'single name Beckett titles' this was, FFS Beckett man, but yes, it is magnificent.

Catcher In The Rye might actually be underrated now, after decades of serving as everyone's lazy go-to for why white boy lit is bad.

I kind of agree with this. It's been aeons since I read it, but to my mind it's been pilloried to an extent it doesn't deserve (tbh I probably read it at the 'right' age, being younger than Holden Caulfield himself at the time, so I'm not sure how much I'd hate it re-reading as an adult).

Kid me is really really wanting me to vote for Wyndham though, he was a big name in my younger reading. But no! It shall not be.

the point of the book

Yeah, well it angered me when I was 15.

i have no critical distance from this novel and will fite anyone about it

my poor students who dislike it

I was taking ages composing that post so missed most of the Catcher talk and everything's been said more eloquently now, oh well.

Should vote for Beckett but would like to vote for Elizabeth Taylor or Anthony Powell. I feel oddly affectionate for Barbary Shore.

also the serious objects of Holden's criticism (not when he's throwing the word "phony" around at nothing, but when he really means it) totally deserve it! rich white dudes who view life as a game because it's rigged in their favor! he's right!

xxp

xp I voted Powell, Dance is my favourite work of fiction.

i realize not everyone itt can be expected to have reread Catcher yearly for the past six years because they teach it, but i have opinions4u

I am 100% here for horseshoe-defends-Holden.

I have no idea how I'd respond to it now but I also hated the fact that it was set in a decade I didn't give a shit about and the whole thing was just way too American for comfort. (I'm drawing on my shallow teenage memories here.)

a decade I didn't give a shit about

War notwithstanding, obv.

It also goes without saying that *I* was not a phony and therefore had nothing in common with Holden.

it is v American, for sure!

xp i also think i literally didn't get as a kid that it's a novel about grief. as an adult, it destroys me.

It's funny to imagine that anyone was ever shocked by it on a moral level due to the profanity and cigarette-smoking and such, when the themes of family and home are so strong. It's a very sentimental book for me, rather than any kind of emblem of rebellion.

i think Holden is a nascent anti-capitalist though lol. also, i liked it as a kid because of the profanity and the thrill of someone daring to flunk out of school etc.

but yes, it is v sentimental. i can never read the passage where Holden recounts how he reacted to Allie's death aloud because it makes me cry. after he tells us he punched out the windows in his garage, he says something like "it was a very stupid thing to do, i admit, but i didn't hardly know i was doing it, and you didn't know Allie." sob!

sorry, should i have spoilered that?

This is really making me want to reread it! I haven't read it since I was twelve and now I'm realizing I don't really remember it at all.

I voted Daughter of Time because it's such an irresistible comfort read, but there's so much here that I either haven't read or don't remember.

i recommend it! as an adult who teaches kids, Lily, i think you will find the whole "i want to catch kids before they fall off a cliff" thing very moving.

xp

I will read it! That does sound like something I would respond to as an adult.

It was my first Salinger, when I was 15 or 16 (would have floored me at 12?!), and I think I found it effective as an opening blast of bad-breath, zit-and-cig-ridden teen attitude, incl the sentiment tangled up in blue and booo, but soon came to prefer Nine Stories and "Franny" ("Zooey" was too much of a lecture). And that's as far as I got w Salinger, though I (kinda) hope to get back to the other books, and re-read Catcher(Seemingly no need to likewise Nine, the hooks of which are stuck in my head).

But, if it's not too soon to move own, I'll vote, as always, for the one I remember best and most favorably: From Here To Eternity is an epic (not just long, but panoramic and zoom lens) blast of attitude, incl. adult experience, ripened and yet *ripe* (like, a pungent pageant, Pops)swoop through life at Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, with some flashes back to Great Depression mainland, before, during and after the Japanese attack---which, in context, ain't that big a surprise, and is something of a release, for the moment. A novel centered on 1941, published in 1951, and seeming as Beat as for instance the hardiest parts of Ginsberg's "America" "Go fuck your self with your Atom Bomb...My mind is made up, there's going to be trouble/America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel" (minus the neurosis of AG as narrator, although some/most of Jones's characters are pretty messed up)---to the extent that I wondered how he and the publishers managed such a Highly Acclaimed best seller in early Cold War (also early Korean War).
The Kindle and a subsequent print edition are even more uncut, w even more about interface of gay white men of means from the mainland, now residing in Honolulu, and military guys just tryin' to make a little more beer-and-cig money, see?
Not the deepest, but pretty good on gender and race and class and war for a brash white male author of the era, and of course a lot that got left out of the movie, although Montgomery Clift's and Ernest Borgnine's characters, as written and portrayed, are true to the original.

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson is less eventful on the surface than some of her other novels, but the undercurrent is strong, it sits in me in a physical way, and even though less 'horror' things happen it's perhaps even more unsettling than your Haunting of Hill House or 'Castle'. I dare you to find a subtler exploration of horror in the ordinary that still sends chills down your spine in a 'let's keep the light on' kind of way than this.

I don't know that I'd nominate it as best in this company, but The End of the Affair has always been a very special book to me.

It's really, really Catholic. I should say that upfront in case that puts people off, or they're intrigued by his Catholic works.

It's a gorgeously written tale of infidelity, longing that curdles to pain then to anger and it's set in London during the Blitz - the lovers are separated by a bomb hitting the house they are in. My mind keeps turning to this again and again during this time because a lot of it is about loving someone you can't see, but in the end it is not really about that either.

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

For all the high-mindedness about faith and belief and the struggle for both, it is the mundane details that stay with me. Sarah deliberately eating onions when they dine together for the first time, although her husband hates them.

And the simplicity with which Greene details his agony just makes it tear at you more. Like smiling through bitter tears.

I had the security of possessing nothing. I could have no more than I had lost, while he still owned her presence at the table, the sound of her feet on the stairs, the opening and closing of doors, the kiss on the cheek - I doubt if there was much else now, but what a lot to a starving man is just that much.

I need to read this again properly so I can write a better post about it than this.

it’s a great book, and I love it

always makes me wish i were Catholic tbh

I am Catholic and let me tell you, it’s pretty accurate in some parts but you’re not missing anything.

The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger -- don't hate it but definitely read it too late in life to really like it

Foundation by Isaac Asimov -- this book has cast too long a shadow over too much SF, given that it's not very good

The Grass Harp by Truman Capote -- books you know you've read but even when you read the Wikipedia summary you can't remember

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson -- HangsAman, not Hangsman: wonderful lurid gothic dark comedy

The Morning Watch by James Agee -- really quietly beautiful little novel, wish he's written more fiction

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford -- eh, it's OK, minor Mitford

The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat -- good stiff-upper-lip WW2 melodrama, most of the characters are rather more likeable than seems realistic

The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham -- absolutely impossible to be objective about this, the first book I actually stayed up all night reading with a torch under the blankets

The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene -- one of his best books, I love it, the perfect people-getting-on-with-grubby-love-life-while-bombs-drop book

A Game Of Hide And Seek by Elizabeth Taylor -- she can do no wrong

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis -- did not recapture the LWW magic, no matter how much I tried to make it do so as a kid

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett -- almost as fucking amazing as...

Molloy by Samuel Beckett -- fucking amazing

She Who Was No More by Bolieau-Narcejac -- this is pretty great but Les Diaboliques, the film that came from it, is even better

Maigret And The Burglar's Wife by Georges Simenon -- typically excellent

Suspicion by Friedrich Durrenmatt -- quite good, a bit bonkers

Going Wyndham for reason listed above

Even made some triffids recently:

Made some tiny triffids:
(made from polyclay, bits of coathanger, bits of thread, floral wire, paper and old plastic flowers) pic.twitter.com/tkOyhGuOlh

— Caustic Cover Critic 📚 (@Unwise_Trousers) March 10, 2021

Just so. Put those triffids on my grave, all my life I've been concave.
The Morning Watch by James Agee -- really quietly beautiful little novel, wish he's written more fiction Just what I came back to post! Just this and A Death In The Family, right? Must check.

Yeah, I think those are the only two. He also wrote the best film review ever:
https://i.ibb.co/GJ73ph0/DJ-gd90-VYAII4n-S.jpg

bless you for these posts, horseshoe; i always feel so alone when the cool twitter kids start trying to outdo each other in their disdain for catcher.

He would have killed it on letterboxd.

xp

Day of the Triffids is class. Probably my choice too.

I also appreciated Catcher In The Rye and horseshoe’s posts about it and instinctively bridle at people who try to kid on that it’s shit, I read it at exactly the right age but there’s still a lot to love there even thinking it back years later. The title scene is one that sticks with me in detail almost two decades later.

Day of the triffids was such a gripping read as a teenager so it’s probably that but I have to put in a mention for the cruel sea which was my grandfather’s favourite book and movie (he was in the merchant navy on North Atlantic convoys). I should read it again.

haha we are not alone! Twitter posts deriding Catcher (and other books) always piss me off.

I'm voting Catcher. I reread all the Salinger stories over Christmas - so good. A Backlisted episode from a few months ago helped me rethink Catcher when they framed Holden as a young man having a nervous breakdown rather than a cool teenage rebel. I really liked Franny & Zooey and RHtRB,C + Seymour too.

thanks horseshoe, lots of stuff I've been thinking but pur much better than I could. Also just rewatched the film Six Degrees of Separation and there is a speech defending Catcher in there, love that film too.

My ranking of Narnia books is H&HB>VOTDT>MN>>SC>>>LW&W>>>PC>>>LB - haven't read any since childhood and wondering if my kids would like them.

I always thought "Prince Caspian" was one of the weaker Narnia books. Though, strangely, it seems to be the best of the recent big-budget, film versions. Let me see, I've read a few of these. Most recently I re-read "Malone Dies", after taking a crack at re-reading "Molloy" but finding I was not in the mood for some of the more tedious slapstick business. It was okay. I think "Foundation" may be Asimov's best novel, at least of the ones I've read. I also read "Catcher in the Rye" perhaps a bit too late in life, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I read Styron's "Lie Down in Darkness" a few years ago. It was also okay. I don't remember much about it. Actually not sure which one I'd vote for.

The main thing I remember about Foundation is that it's a novel set in the future that has zero women in it, even in minor roles. Even as a kid I found that weird.

"what was that you said about not getting to vote for Durrenmatt again, xyzz?"

what I meant was that The Judge is probably the best of his novellas and I probably wouldn't vote for anything else.

This is what I have read:

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
Forbbiden Colours by Yukio Mishima
The Conformist by Alberto Moravia
The Master Of Go by Yasunari Kawabata
Memoirs Of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

I want to go for one of the Becketts but I will get to vote for one of the later ones (I love Mercier and Camier a lot), so its between Yourcenar and Moravia and I am going for Hadrian, its a very good historical recreation.

I will read Catcher in the Rye one day, if only to satisfy my curiosity.

(I love Mercier and Camier a lot),amen

We should've probably included it in the 1946 poll but I suppose it's too late now.

It was published in the 70s so was thinking it could be included then

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

I didn’t vote for The End of the Affair despite what I said about it itt but I’m pleased two of you did.

Of the zero votes, Forbidden Colours is a very well-written novel where it's hard to tell to what extent it is an exploration of a misogynist and/or by a misogynist.
Malone Dies is not much weaker than Molloy but I guess it suffers from middle-of-the-trilogy neglect, like Three Colours: White.

Right, I thought that was late for L Frank Baum if he had started in teh previous century. So good to hear I had my timeline about right if he died in 191.
THought that was odd. THough of course there are always unpublished works released way posthumously.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1952

foundation has a neat idea but it's horribly written and doesn't even do justice to the idea