Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1954

One would assume that Tolkien's winning this one, but might be hurt by vote splitting because of quarrels over which of the two is better (it's Fellowship ftr). Is anything popular enough to swoop in? Bonjour Tristesse, Lord Of The Flies?

Anyway, if I was being 100% honest I'd go with Fellowship, but think I'll drop a strategic vote for Under The Net instead - a rollicking comic novel featuring the British cinema industry, as far from the other Murdoch I've read as it could possibly be.

The Jorge Amado is actually a trilogy, too, but they were all published the same year and in the unlikely event there's more than one ILXor who wants to vote for one of them I felt I shouldn't votesplit (and, as importantly, take up spaces from other writers).

Haven't read the Simenon but there's a great movie adaptation by the recently deceased Bertrand Tavernier.

I'll go with Golding. More because I hated Fellowship of the Ring and I want it to lose than anything else.

I'm Not Stiller is an incredible book. I need to reread that one, it's been years.

I'm not sure I'd ever want to read it again, but LOTF left more of an impression on me than LOTR

I love I Am Legend and will vote for that. Tolkien will be just fine without me, I'm sure.

Hmmmmm. I've read a few of these and I have issues with all of them, tbh. I think this might be a very grudging vote for Sagan. Never been sure if the accuracy of bourgeois vacuousness portrayed is a highly skilful rendition of its target or if Sagan's work is just itself vacuous and bourgeois.

i have read none of these...i really think i should read Lord of the Flies; students are always telling me they love it.

Would also like to read the García Márquez, the Shirley Jackson, the Lessing, and the Murdoch.

The Bird's Nest made a huge impression on me; it's hard to say if that impression was good or bad, but it was very memorable. But I don't feel qualified to vote in this poll as I haven't read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, The Sound of Waves, or Nectar in a Sieve.

tbf the impression left on me by LOTF might not be a positive one: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

My dad has this thing about Lord of the Flies being the crappy version of A High Wind in Jamaica, which I think he got from his dad. So I was raised to think of it as a bad book, and I read it so long ago I have no idea what I actually think of it.

i think part of the reason i still haven't read LOTF is that it sounds horrifying lol.

Went for Amos Tutuola over the handful of other entries I've read if only to give the lad a fighting chance.

There were plans to make a gender reversed LOTF recently, and a lot of the ppl arguing against it suggested that LOTF is about masculinity. As someone whose biggest bullies were girls - and the bullying included physical assault, fwiw - I was somewhat unmoved by this argument. Not saying the gender-switched film project looked good, mind.

I read LOTF in high school and thought it seemed plausible, but don't remember it so well, like several of these (as usual). I read LOTR long after most of my friends, who had for instance those Ballentine paperbacks, but I was lucky enough to get hooked on library copy of a three-in-one edition, as originally intended ( with lots of typos excised and at least some of the author's past-the-last-minute corrections, tiny, belatedly deciphered marginalia scribbles in drafts and galleys etc [like Balzac and Proust])---so I don't want to vote for a single volume.
I'll go with the other one I remember best, I Am Legend: Matheson, macabre and methodical as usual, works out the path and practices of the one Normal Man in a (post-pandemic)world of vampires and their subjugates---for them, he is the nightmare terrorist, and what does this do to his righteous Normality, and why as well as how does he do the things he does.

I've read shamefully few of these, basically just the Tolkiens and the Narnia, none of which I have a strong memory of, other than Tolkien was much more of a slog than I had been led to believe, maybe I read it too young.

Have read a surprising 11 of these. Not as strong a year as 1953, I guess Lord of the Flies is "objectively" the best, but familiarity has bred if not contempt, then a certain ennui. Another ambivalent vote for Bonjour Tristesse.

This list feels like a merge of separate universes. Lucky Jim, Lord of the Rings, García Márquez, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Céline, Gore Vidal, Ian Fleming and Mishima simultaneously.

That's one of the main reasons I do these, tbh. I remember a friend owning a book where you could see which historical figures were contemporaries and that sense of parallel realities co-existing is something I get a tremendous kick out of.

Lord of the Flies is conservative, establishment propaganda. There's a reason everyone gets taught it in school

Couldn't be that schoolkids enjoy reading about the dark side of schoolkids.

It worked on you then

Lord Of The Flies usually gets the "all kids are like this" treatment but it was only ever really a "English public school boys are like this" thing.

could have voted for 6 or so last time, there are a good 6 or so here that look like solid second choices.

Lord of the Flies is conservative, establishment propaganda.

Care to elaborate? I haven't read the thing myself, but have heard similar critiques centring on the idea that humans in LOTF are fundamentally bad and a repressive society the only way to counteract this; I'd argue that a novel about schoolboys surely cannot ever be that, as schoolchildren are already deeply socialised creatures (even one about infants would be tricky in this regard). Isn't it much more likely that Golding is showing up the societal values they've absorbed and are now trying to replicate?

Lord Of The Flies usually gets the "all kids are like this" treatment but it was only ever really a "English public school boys are like this" thing.

Again, don't want to get too deep in the weeds on this, not having read, but: I can certainly state from personal experience that English public school boys have no monopoly on bullying, sadism and a love of hierarchy.

there is the jungle = primitive thing which is unfortunate

Yes schoolchildren are already socialised but the insinuation is that once the rules and structures are removed they would regress very quickly to violent warring 'animals'. Which assumes that humans were that way before being saved by civilisation, naturally that way as a species, and not the co-operative, egalitarian people that plenty of evidence suggests they were

Again, don't want to get too deep in the weeds on this, not having read, but: I can certainly state from personal experience that English public school boys have no monopoly on bullying, sadism and a love of hierarchy.

I was assigned both Nectar in a Sieve and The Sound of Waves in 9th grade, I mostly remember the former as very bleak but compelling and the latter as baffling, have been meaning to read more Mishima though.

Have a copy of I’m Not Stiller around that I should read as well.

Anyone have anything to say about the later Celine novels?

Which assumes that humans were that way before being saved by civilisation, naturally that way as a species, and not the co-operative, egalitarian people that plenty of evidence suggests they were

Those cooperative, egalitarian "uncivilized" communities are not populated solely by young boys. The group Lord of the Flies portrays has nothing in common with stable traditional societies and quite a bit in common with English public schoolboys whenever adults were removed from the scene. It is not a very convincing portrayal of any other known social grouping.

I'm not saying they were. And I'm not saying that's what Golding intended the work to be about either, I've no idea what his intentions were. But I do believe it's presence on the curriculum for decades in English schools at least was one of the more transparent incremental reinforcements of the status quo that I can think of right now

I'm interested in how it's taught in the USA, where presumably the UK public school context is less obvious

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Voting Story of O to stick it to E. L. James.

We should do a TS: Hobbes vs Rousseau some time.

xps

I don't think the supposed point of LOTF is that when rules are removed people regress to being 'animals'. The boys' saviour is a naval officer from a warship!

Voting Story of O to stick it to E. L. James.

Françoise Hardy talks about interviewing the mysterious author in her autobio btw.

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1955

Nerd vote surprisingly directed towards Matheson! Still glad Fellowship got more votes than Two Towers.

Three votes for Story Of O more than I expected, too.

Normance by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Sound Of Waves by Yukio Mishima
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

Normance or Sound of Waves but didn't vote.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1955

(oh, has been linked before. looked unfamiliar when i saw it in sna)