Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1978

I am noticing that due to my old fogey tastes my grasp of which authors are canonical/well regarded is starting to slip and this will only get worse as we move nearer to the present - apologies in advance.

Can imagine The Stand winning this!

Requiem For A Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.
Yes by Thomas Bernhard
Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec

I'll vote for Perec, who I loved a lot more than I do these days (the book with 'Species of Spaces' is what I'd return to) but Life is really fine.

i voted for The Shining but wouldn't vote for The Stand, i don't think (and haven't). which is probably the influence of the film.

Failed to vote in the last couple of these but slamming that button down for Perec this year.

I've read a few of them from this year but mostly in my teens, and I could make an attempt at defending, say, The Cement Garden and Women, but I no longer know if I would feel the same way about them as I did then.

Fortunately L:AUM is amazing and I don't have to face those quandaries at all, ahahahaha.

I have a lot of time for McEwan up to the early 80s, at which point the self-indulgence starts to kick in. Think "Saturday" may be the worst widely-acclaimed novel I've ever read.

Using my King vote for The Dead Zone. At least three good-to-great gay novels here, and I'm tossing my vote to Dancer From The Dance.

xp "Up to the early 80s" means only his first two novels! I'll rep for most of them up to and including 'Atonement' but yep 'Saturday' is a precipitous drop. 'The Cement Garden' has strong first novel vibes. I've also read 'The Stand', 'The Sea, The Sea' and 'Life: A Users Manual', out of those the last is the clear winner.

I also like the short story collections, so you could call it 5 books, which is more than many! Atonement was a good film.

Voting The World According to Garpbecause it expands beyond the limits of novelist Garp himself (crucially, it's third-person narrative). Maybe too anecdotal, but good yarns, recurring subplot lines. This was the book that got everybody in Collegetown (and even some parents in Hometown!)reading fiction just for pleasure again. Of course, there wasn't much on cable yet, no video stores had showed up hereabouts, but still.

I loved Garp when I was 17, wrote my big A-level English Literature essay on it, scared to revisit it though.

I read Garp in pretty much one hit in a bedroom in Helsinki and am glad to leave it in there in its perfect form. Despite my username I'm notified remotely interested in Bukowski any more. And The Stand I did re-read a couple of years back and it goes on and on (not today mention the 'magical' black and disabled characters).

I have a similar relationship with McEwan to most here. Enduring Love would be my departure point I think.

I read "Garp" way back when it was the omnipresent Irving on people's bookshelves. Later in the '90s it was supplanted by "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (which I never read).

I read The Cement Garden in preparation for seeing the movie, and found the book told the story so well I had no interest in seeing the movie afterwards.

Write-in vote for "Billy Phelan's Greatest Game" by William Kennedy.

I should have read that. Did read several other Kennedys in the 80s, when he was in bloom. May well vote for Ironweed when we get to '83. Has some of the same characters as BPGC. O Albany, in the early 20th Century.

The film of The Cement Garden is as good as the book, captures its atmosphere really well.

I didn't expect to be disappointed by the film, I just thought the book was visual and tactile enough that I wouldn't get any more out of seeing it.

xxp Actually WK was in bloom way before that, but there were all of these reprints and new books in rapid succession, seemed liked (I belonged to QPBC, Quality Paperback Book Club). Esp. when the screen adaptation (which he wrote) of Ironweed came out, with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep (Kael panned it, I think, but I liked it, thought it conveyed the somber, seamyy. sometimes desperate, vitality-mortality and momentum of the novel pretty well).

xp you should check out First Love, Last Rites, very similar in feel and I don't think he's ever written anything better.

It is also kind of horrifying though

Wait, is this the year Tim was excited about? Where's the football stickers annual?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Life a user’s manual is great if you like an unaccountably large number of references to octagons

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

"Wait, is this the year Tim was excited about?"

Indeed it was.

I missed The Bookshop, that's a good one.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1979

I missed The Bookshop, that's a good one.

I was the other vote for it. :)

I had to dip out of these threads for a bunch of IRL reasons but yes this was the one I was waiting for and yes thanks everyone for voting for the correct number 1.

Glad to have been of service.