Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1952

This has to be Invisible Man - a powerful and often depressing novel about race in America that is also endlessly inventive in its style and tone. Sad Ellison didn't do that much after it, but also kinda makes sense, like he just poured everything into this major work. Also a debut novel!

I remember feeling a strong need to wash after reading The Killer Inside Me, this is not meant as a judgement on the book either way.

surprised at how many of these I have read (6 - compared to 0 for several years in the 40s)

This is one of those tough ones with a few very dear books to me. Kneejerk and probably correct choice is Invisible Man but I have much love for Go and need to think about the whole list a bit more

Lot of good ones here (Wise Blood, Charlotte’s Web, Old Man and the Sea, Price of Salt, Excellent Women, but it has to be Invisible Man.

Excellent Women would probably be my number 2.

Way too many I haven't read on this list, but it's gotta be Invisible Man.

east of eden was my first favorite book of all time!!! i haven't read it since. invisible man def the best thing i've read here. shout out to my man vasily grossman though (i haven't read stalingrad)

Argh, this is a year full of books I should have read (either b/c they're "important" somehow or because they're on my never ending to-read list), but I've only actually read the kidlit here, and none of them are particular favourites.

The film of Wise Blood was my favourite film for some time, but I've still never got round to reading it. I'm so bad at keeping up.

I haven't thought about Hemingway for a long time but a student teacher used a passage of The Old Man and the Sea the other day and I felt quite moved by it. Not sure I'd revisit but it has a particular energy I'd forgotten about. I'll probably go Wise Blood.

I need to sort my shit out and read Invisible Man.

I am committed to disliking Hemingway because of his whole deal as a person, and I can appreciate that he was a good writer without him being at all my thing, but Old Man in the Sea is perfect

Lol *and the sea

The student teacher was using the Old Man under the Sea so the kids could work up description using figurative language. I'm sure wholesome old Ernest would have loved it.

I've read six of these. All of them good to some degree. Invisible Man sits at the top.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
The Borrowers by Mary Norton

I genuinely can't make a decision here, I might have to pick a short straw or something.

I might be tempted to vote for later Vonnegut, but I don't think he had really hit his stride yet with "Player Piano". "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is one of the better Narnia books, but it's not quite in the top tier for me, which would consist of "Wise Blood", "Invisible Man" and "Charlotte's Web".

Due credit to a grad school professor who in the late '90s assigned Grossman when he was impossible to find outside a library.

I prefer other Pyms and lemonade. My favorites:

Wise Blood
Invisible Man
Charlotte’s Web
A Buyer's Market

But I may award this to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: the most consistently surprising Narnia novel, sustaining its Odyssey structure.

Hemlock And After by Angus Wilson -- decent novel, startlingly forthright about queerness for its time

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison -- stone-cold masterpiece

The Natural by Bernard Malamud -- I cannot stand baseball but I still found this gripping

The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola -- another stone-cold masterpiece, and quite a unique work stylistically and with a vivid, strange worldview where the border between life and death is less significant than crossing the road

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor -- ANOTHER stone-cold masterpiece, fucking hell, 1952 was a good year

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White -- ANOTHER stone cold masterpiece, but this time, you know, for kids!

Go by John Clellon Holmes -- the only Beat novel I would unreservedly recommend to other humans

The Groves Of Academe by Mary McCarthy -- fun and bitchy

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson -- beautifully pitched bit of horribleness, one of his best books

The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway -- this is probably his best work, short enough to not show too many of his flaws, no female characters to be written about embarrassingly

The Price Of Salt by Patricia Highsmith -- slightly uncharacteristic of her books plotwise, but a stylish minor masterpiece

Beat Not The Bones by Charlotte Jay -- actually really good crime novel about Australians in Papua New Guinea (then an Australian protectorate), very atmospheric and vividly drawn

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym -- one of her darker books, and all the better for it

The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton -- the first Gorse book, hugely funny and creepy

A Many-Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin -- interesting but dated interracial-romance-and-the-resulting-prejudices novel

Men At Arms by Evelyn Waugh -- the first Guy Crouchback novel, his most three-dimensional and likeable character, a genuinely excellent book

The Sound Of His Horn by Sarban -- lurid alternate-history Nazis-won novel about fascist having hunting parties where they chase naked women through the wilderness; better than this makes it sound

The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis -- one of the good Narnia books

Les Animaux dénaturés by Vercors -- weird but recommended little SF novel about bioethics

Mount Analogue by René Daumal -- unfinished, but a lot of fun; surrealist parody of Great Expedition accounts, to find a previously undiscovered mountain bigger than any other on the face of the Earth

The Financial Expert by R.K. Narayan -- Narayan was almost always quietly brilliant, as here

The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino -- man gets cut in half by a cannonball, both halves continue to lead their now separate lives; charming and clever

Normally I'd vote for Ellison, but Tutuola's book is such a unique and wonderful thing I have to go for that.

The Daumal is the one I want to read the most of this lot, tbh. At least partly b/c of another ilx0r's twitter handle.

I only read it a few weeks ago, it was very enjoyable.

It’s a lot of fun, I heard of it first via Daniel Pinkwater recommending it in in Lizard Music.

I still wanna read these---as wiki sez:
Juneteenth is Ralph Ellison's second novel, published posthumously in 1999 as a 368-page condensation of over 2,000 pages written by him over a period of 40 years.[1] It was originally written without any real organization, and Ellison's longtime friend, biographer and critic John F. Callahan, put the novel together, editing it in the way he thought Ellison would want it to be written.

The fuller version of the manuscript was published as Three Days Before the Shooting... on February 2, 2010.
And Flying Home: and Other Stories and still haven't read the essays, Shadow and Act. But I'll start with Juneteenth.

Flying Home is wonderful.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Learned in the LRB that the happy ending of The Price Of Salt was editorial meddling and not Highsmith's initial intent.

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1953