Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 2001

Voting for the Javier Cercas, engrossing novel about the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. Roberto Bolano makes a cameo appearence.

Funnily enough I'm reading The Rotters Club right now, a much stranger book than I was anticipating, some parts (generally the comedy) are terrible, and should have been cut, the central characters are not that well-drawn, but on the whole I'm still entranced by it, just the sheer ambition, the world-building, the variety and the restlessness.

Was largely blank until I saw Austerlitz, which is good enough to win any year.

Sadly a novella, otherwise I'm sure it'd be the runaway winner:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f2/God%27s_Debris.jpg/200px-God%27s_Debris.jpg

A year of books I started and gave up on

Bel Canto -- I remembered halfway through that I don't like opera. The back of the book had an author interview where she said she didn't really like opera either.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen -- professor banging his student in the first chapter
Atonement by Ian McEwan -- purple prose, false rape accusation

i saw someone saying recently that they wouldn't spoil Hardy's Tess by re-reading it. that's kinda how i feel about American Gods. but it's that or nothing.

I liked the film of Atonement, but from experience am steering clear of all post-80s McEwan.
Read American Gods but it just didn't grab me, I can barely remember it now.
The Corrections had some well-worked & memorable set pieces, but as a whole seemed like a big load of nothing much.

Read two of these and will vote for neither, although minor Mills is still good stuff obviously

there are a lot of terrible wrong 'uns on this list too

sometimes i wonder if i'm unfair to David Mitchell because he shares his name with a cunt but then i remember i've read some of his work and no i'm not being unfair

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen -- professor banging his student in the first chapter

i think i liked this book okay, but all i can really remember about it is that the student’s name was that of my former sister-in-law

austerlitz is gonna run away with this. i made my contribution

I'm back on zero for this year. Atonement was definitely after I'd stopped reading McEwans, and I was mostly out of the self-important middle-brow man hole at this point.

At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill - this I remember as being a right fucking pain in my life. It was the cause of several conversations where someone mentioned it and I was all "oh, you mean At Swim, Two Birds?", get nothing but a blank look or maybe some mockery, and then be so unconfident in my own brain that I would think I invented a book that didn't exist. Accidental gaslighting, thanks everyone.

Also, anyone read the Robbe-Grillet from this year? I hadn't realised he was still working at this point.

Another year, another David Mitchell novel I own but haven't got round to reading. Other than that I got nothing.

I have read number9dream but have zero recollection. I apparently have more time for McEwan than most people here, iirc (possibly not) Atonement is a pretty great last flourish of talent before he went completely to pot. Might vote for Le Guin though, not the best book of the series but a fine and transformative culmination.

I may have said it better on whichever What Are You Reading?, but here's how I put it on The Sebald Fiction Poll

The only one I've read (so far!) is Austerlitz, the edition with James Wood's handy intro (he's also got a couple of Sebald commentaries on lrb and newyorker). Looking at the takes on other books here, I suspect Sebald's even more self-aware here, deliberately putting (most of) his own persona/voice in the narrator's occasional encounters with the long and winding, musically associative, gradually and compulsively accruing momentum of Austerlitz the outsider pilgrim---results: beautiful (go A. go). What a swan song.

― dow, Monday, October 11, 2021 6:31 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Putting most of it in the narrative-within-the narrative, I mean, as in Heart of Darkness.

― dow, Monday, October 11, 2021

I’ve read 0 of these.

also, shit me at American Gods being 20 years old

Voting Austerlitz, but the only other one I've read is American Gods, which I didn't like.

austerlitz without a second thought, though i've only read one other of these ("the corrections," i remember it being very sanctimonious?). spinning so much beauty out of trauma is unreal.

the problem with "the great american novel" is that america as a subject blows imo

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I've been in a book club for 20+ years. We read and then discuss about 6-8 books a year, all fiction.

I remember At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill as one of my favorites

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 2002

s/o to the other Cercas voter

I think I forgot to vote in this but would've voted "Austerlitz" as well. The only other one I've read is "Atonement" which was pretty good, but not good enough to compete with the melancholy, mysterious mood of the Sebald.

i shuffled between austerlitz and cercas and ended up voting for the latter (s/o to you too Daniel_Rf). Soldiers of Salamis was a great read, made even more enjoyable by Bolano's cameo, as i read this right after finishing the savage detectives