Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1984

Hope Kundera doesn't win this, the parts on the surveillance state are gripping but the rest of that book feels very self-important and horny in an uninteresting way.

no Lincoln?!

Empire Of The Sun, Hotel du Lac, Unbearable Lightness , fine, but this year belongs to Saramago.

Very much agreed.

Going with Duras.

xp

That Kundera is sometime poster tangenttangent's most-hated book of all time iirc - I haven't touched it. Acker seems a likely frontrunner here?

Really don't have much of a grasp on what Gore Vidal novels are rated as his best and reception to previous Vidal inclusions has been very tepid. But as always, happy to make sure to include important works of his in future installments, if he has any - just lemme know.

I could see this going to Kundera, Saramago, Martin Amis

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago
Past Perfect by Yaakov Shabtai
Indian Nocturne by Antonio Tabucchi
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera
Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

I read the Barnes for the ILB book club.

Shabtai is one to mention as v good, but not something ppl will know.

I'll go for Duras bcz her late works are special to me.

oooh forgot Woodcutters, my first Bernhar.

Unbearable Lightness blew my mind when I was 19, haven't reread since but really think I would be a lot more positive than anyone else so far ITT if I did

voting for So Long... as promised in a previous round

the film >>> the novel

noooo the novel >>>>>>>>>>>>> the film

Dictionary Of The Khazars by Milorad Pavić

Easy choice for me here.

Hope Kundera doesn't win this, the parts on the surveillance state are gripping but the rest of that book feels very self-important and horny in an uninteresting way.

― Daniel_Rf

Ha, I remember liking it a lot but iirc this is damningly accurate.

A lot of "an author I like but not my favorite book" on here

so i originally read money on a bootleg digital copy. i thought it was an interesting character study that ended kinda abruptly. eventually, i picked up a physical copy and i realized that my digital copy excised the entire final half of the book, where his life falls apart.

still, great book, and it taught me a valuable lesson about how sometimes piracy is bad

Lots to love here:

The Boys on the Rock is sad and beautiful (and hot)
Neuromancer is fine in my memory and I'll leave it that way
Blood and Guts is magnificent
Empire of the Sun a bit of an outlier for Ballard?
Hotel du Lac feels like a minor Brookner but beautiful all the same
Money my favourite Amis
The Unbearable Lightness of Being feels like the oldest book here?
The Bone People had a huge effect on me when I read it but apprehensive about revisiting

Acker, Amis (spit) or Keri Hulme I think.

I've read these: Hunt for Red October, Neuromancer, Blood and Guts in High School, Flaubert's Parrot, and So Long and Thanks for all The Fish. My vote is Flaubert's Parrot.

As usual, several on here I read too near publication for voting with conviction at this point. And Empire of the Sun, based on events of the author's own life, eventually seemed like summer blockbuster numbness, maybe fabulous armor for an emotional core he didn't care to plumb, or no longer had access to---should read it again, but there are so many of those, and several of these I still need to read.
Going with The Lover, which was hot and made me question myself and I still want to read these related---take it wiki:
There are two published versions of The Lover: one written in the form of an autobiography, without any superimposed temporal structures, as the young girl narrates in first-person; the other, called The North China Lover and released in conjunction with the film version of the work, is in film script form, in the third person, with written dialogue and without internal monologue. This second version also contains more humor than the original.

In the first version of Avital Inbar's Hebrew translation (Maariv publishers,1986), there is (page 11) an excerpt, dictated by Marguerite Duras on the phone to her translator. A section that does not appear in any other version of the book.

Barbara Bray's English translation won the Scott Moncrieff Prize and PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 1986.

Real-life connections
Duras published The Lover[1] when she was 70, 55 years after she met Léo, the Chinese man of her story (she never revealed his surname). She wrote about her experience in three works: The Sea Wall, The Lover, and The North China Lover.[2][3]

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Douglas Adams again. I read his first book, and had no desire to read more. Robert Sheckley had done it all before and better.

My impression (mostly second-hand, since I've read so little of him) is that Adams wasn't really a writer, rather an inventor of whimsical notions. Alasdair Beckett-King is a current example. It must be an English thing. I don't feel strongly about any of this, just a kind of puzzled wonder at Adams's recurring appearance on these lists.

Hitchhiker's Guide was huge in the '80s in the US. I never knew anybody who'd listened to the original BBC radio broadcasts, but the book was very popular and spawned lots of tie-ins like the famous text-based computer game

Yeah, Hitchhiker's Guide was pressed on me by a friend, and I read it out of loyalty.

Voted for Munif, by the way.

So Long ... is a much, much better book than HHGTG imo and demonstrates he really could write

So Long is the worst book is worst book of the 5-book trilogy, or at least the one that fans of the series like the least. It's mostly a romcom, with one sci-fi-y thing in the final chapter.

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

re-read neuromancer a few years ago, and while i did not and would never vote for it, it holds up much better than a 40yo book of its type has any right to

The sky above the port was the colour of ilx, tuned to a dead thread

Camaraderie, I am heartened to find out you actually consider Life, The Universe & Everything to be the best Douglas Adams, as I had taken yr previous declaration that the 4th book is the best to be referring to Mostly Harmless, which I really couldn't justify on any level.

My impression (mostly second-hand, since I've read so little of him) is that Adams wasn't really a writer, rather an inventor of whimsical notions. Alasdair Beckett-King is a current example. It must be an English thing. I don't feel strongly about any of this, just a kind of puzzled wonder at Adams's recurring appearance on these lists.

Well, I also include stuff like, say, Jackie Collins or Ian Fleming in these - Adams is a more constant presence than those two were purely because he always gets votes. While the area he influenced - comedy sci-fi- may be somewhat niche, I think his influence on it is enormous (and mostly bad, you could say); like there's a whole cottage industry of Adams rip-offs that you can purchase. Stephen King is an example of someone whose shtick is pretty easy to dismiss too and I make sure to include his stuff every year.

No, I really did mean that Mostly Harmless is the best book.

hold on sorry no

So Long ... is the best, Mostly Harmless is awful

So Long is the worst book is worst book of the 5-book trilogy, or at least the one that fans of the series like the least. It's mostly a romcom, with one sci-fi-y thing in the final chapter

SLATFATF is a rom-com only in that it concerns a romantic relationship, and is sometimes funny. typical that a certain kind of fan would turn their noses up at that.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1985

daniel_rf, feel heartened that i often do think that life, the universe, and everything is the best adams

The Boys on the Rock is sad and beautiful (and hot)

Seconded. I read it years ago, and the final pages haunt me still.