Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1980

Eternal Curse On The Reader Of These Pages by Manuel Puig

Never gonna get on the bestseller list with that attitude!

This is gonna be my Douglas Adams vote. Fully expect Confederacy to win - haven't read it.

Housekeeping

Tempted to buy, read and vote for the JL Carr before this poll ends, given how much I loved his FA Cup book a few years previously. Housekeeping is good if you ignore every single simile

Hate Confederacy, can't imagine why anyone would want to read about such awful people.
Haven't read The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four And Five by Doris Lessing but I gather it's in the same series as Shikasta from the year before, which is one of the most miserable, loathsome, misanthropist works it's ever been my displeasure to read.
Riddley Walker is an achievement but not a particularly fun read either.
Didn't love Housekeeping as much as Gilead and subsequent books.
Restaurant - see previous Hitchhikers discussion.
The Name of the Rose - I can only second all the blurbs on the cover of the edition I own:

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A Confederate has funny mordant bits but it's too damn long and nothing O'Connor or Welty hadn't hit.

A relative worships Italo Calvino yet thinks Umberto Eco is "trivial".

Waiting For The Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek
How German Is It by Walter Abish

Going for the Abish, just above the Coetzee.

Housekeeping has stayed with me because of its I want to say luminous darkness but that sounds daft. Anyway, this has to be A Month in the Country, which is perfect.

I've got pretty good staying power for books that rub me up the wrong way but I've tried twice with A Confederacy of Dunces and threw it down both times.

Hard to choose between Riddley Walker and A Month in the Country, but I'm going with Riddley Walker.

Damn, I missed Riddley Walker. Walker is my name and I am the same.

I thought as the years progressed closer to the present day I'd be left further in the dust, but I've read at least six of these and they were all good in different ways. Gotta think this one through.

The Twits is funny. A disgusting old married couple do everything within their power to kill each other but end up being done in by a bunch of animals.

Of course this year's list starts with the one Marilynne novel I haven't yet read---wonder if I could get through it before results are in? Gone with Butler several times. Yeah, Riddley Walker, The Name of the Rose would be worthy picks. But A Confederacy..., which seems to move out of the shadows of Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors, has always spoken to Southern me re the warped aspects of New Orleans as twisted portal to and from the old and less old South (from antebellum to Lee Harvey Oswald and the KKK--see also The Earl of Louisiana)---and to book hoarder-"scholar"me as well---and when the medievalist crackpot finally emerges from his nest, he finds followers, all agreeing," "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." This always (from the time of publication) did seem a bit prophetic, re the world beyond NOLA, and has seemed much more so in the Trump Age. All in deadpan, camera pan, grainy, smelly detail, though maybe I'm too sucked into what L. Rust Hills calls the Schlock of Recognition---so be it (would hold off 'til rapid read of the Marilynne, but just emerged from Library of America onionskin slab of Melville, not yet ready for another plunge).

i enjoy confederacy of dunces but it's also sort of not hard to see why it wasn't published during the author's lifetime. essentially a series of broad comic scenes in which the characters act according to how we expect them to act, perhaps somewhat overstaying their welcome by the end. a reasonably fun beach read but not really a great novel.

of the books ive read here the twits is my favourite

have had 'name of the rose' on my tablet for a long time but have been too daunted to read–is it worth the effort?

Housekeeping~Marilynne Robinson

name of the rose? my recall of it is that it's major merit is a deft transposition of standard detective genre tropes into a setting highly antithetical to them. it's entertaining, but requires a suspension of disbelief to accept its improbability. sort of a high class 'summer read'.

I would guess most of the books on this list require some suspension of disbelief.

lol

For me it finally winnowed down to Housekeeping and Human Voices. While the first of these is excellent and strikingly original, I went with the second; it was a book I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish and that pushed it to the top.

Naturally, the Eco.

Tough one

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
or
Waiting For The Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

Pretty different books. With Barbarians Coetzee fine-tuned that insanely catchy voice of his with the blunt, emphatic sentences. Housekeeping is its own thing entirely.

I remember Bourne Identity as a great page-turner, the perfect book to find on the shelf in a summer rental. Restaurant at the End of the Universe was my favorite of the Hitchhiker trilogy as I mentioned on a previous thread. A Month in the Country is a wonderful short novel with great atmosphere. But my vote goes to Confederacy of Dunces which I found hilarious, I guess more than many here did, and with a memorable protagonist.

confederacy is a book i kind of admire in many ways -- the dialogue is very sharp and unique and it is funny at least some of the time, if not quite as funny as it's obviously meant to be. but it really is just too long, by at least a hundred pages. and i'm still not sure what the reader is supposed to feel toward ignatius. the introduction compares him to don quixote, but i think he's more on the level of a minor simpsons character (maybe the comic book guy, who might well have been inspired by him): someone very entertaining in small doses but not someone you need to spend 400+ pages with. i can see why the original editor agonized over rejecting it but, finally, did.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Have only read Human Voices, A Month in the Country, and Riddley Walker, but it's Riddley Walker.

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

Much better than average participation in this one!

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1981

Yeah, and my one vote mattered, I guess.