Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 2011

Very much Ferrante for me.

that's the only one i've read, so that

who will vote for Ready Player One?

A big swathe of meh and haven’t read for me. I read Fifty Shades when it was being published online for free and was a notorious fic people were constantly going “wtf” at, it’s honestly shocking to me it got as big as it did.

Wish I could remember more about Nothing Holds Back the Night; it won a bunch of french prizes and also iirc caused some controversy in france and within her family with its memoir disguised as fiction approach. Probably another one to add to the re-read pile. But yeah it's gotta be Ferrante.

I started reading the Ali Smith but never got past the first section despite being intrigued. Can’t account for that.

Otherwise, this is another poll where I got nothin’.

Milllllllssss

A Cruel Bird is one of my shouts for 'most underrated book I've read'; it absolutely belongs on that 'literary treats' thread; it conveys a world of crazed simplicity and grave humour with the lightest possible touch

i've read the 3 you expect i've read

The Martian by Andy Weir
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller

but not the other one you expect i've read (Reamde) - it's on the TODO list, but quite low because it's 900 pages

*resists urge to vote for Ready Player One just to troll you all*

Ferrante.

Man, A Dance With Dragons is over a decade old. GRRM should def consider writing a sequel!

is Lightning Rods in the same ballpark of greatness as DeWitt 1 btw

i own it but still have yet to read it

I liked Lightning Rods, but it's much smaller-scale than The Last Samurai and has a very weird sense of humor that could easily be off-putting.

TLS is basically a neuroatypical symphony and creed so I'm not surprised if she felt emboldened to Go Weirder, sounds delightful tbh!

Yeah I found Lightning Rods pretty funny but part of it was just that someone would decide to write a book like this in the first place.

Have also read The Sense of an Ending (a drag) and Open City (good, I think, still not sure how I feel about the ending).

think the only one i've read is zone one

Have read more of these than the previous year's list:
The Martian, Ready Player One, Reamde, Swamplandia!, Embassytown, A Sense of an Ending. I have a soft spot for Embassytown due to attending a reading Mièville did.

Limonov, though it isn't a novel at all.

I've just seen Open City, which isn't as good a novel as My Brilliant Friend, but has probably stayed with me to a greater extent. Also a shout out for the Ben Lerner (if only for the section on John Ashbery).

Yeah, tough time picking between those two. Did you participate on the Open City book club thread, can’t remember.

I don't think I did, no. Will look for the thread (and listen to some Mahler).

Leaving the Atocha Station, Zone One, and Among Others are just wonderful (in extremely different ways, though now that I think of it there's something tonally similar between the slightly chilled, distant narrators of the Lerner and the Whitehead) but in a year with My Brilliant Friend they are not contenders for me.

Yeah. But I knew Whitehead was qualified to write Zone One when he disclosed in The New Yorker's Science Fiction Issue (they've only done the one, right?) that he was a Psychotronic Magazine junkie in the 80s. Jacket flap promised literary satisfaction x pulp gratification, and book did not disappoint. I really like Helen DeWitt and Karen Russell, so am glad I haven't read their (and other people's) books on this list, which might entail even more regrets for choosing the Ferrante, yeah, no question.

I struggled with Lightning Rods. I think it's a common problem with comic novels and me in that once I feel like I've keyed into the central idea and 'got it' I sort of switch off. It reminded me, in the broadest sense, of Catch 22 and A Confederacy of Dunces, two other books I've had to abandon because of inertia.

Catch 22 is one of my favourites and Confederacy one of my most hated, I'm now curious to know where I would place Lightning Rods on that continuum.

I added My Brilliant Friend and its three companions to my to-be-read pile today.

The only one I've read is "My Brilliant Friend".

‘Leaving the atocha station’ is a great novel

Oh wow, I’ve actually read 5 of these in the last few years, compared to the usual 0. Loved Atocha Station, and Lightning Rods, but as far as having a “very weird style of humour one could easily find off-putting”, deadpan absurdity is one of my favourite styles of humour, so…

How does The Stranger’s Child compare to the Line of Beauty? I haven’t read either but, seeing how beloved LoB is, I’m curious about TSC, which for me has the crucial benefit of being available as an audiobook.

A real disappointment.

Ferrante

What was effortless now looks fussy, mannered, even the (better realized) contemporary section. xpost

These threads now making me wonder if there's any fiction from the last couple of decades that I've read that doesn't have witchers in it

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

A resurgence of interest, lots of voters coming back, refreshing.

I mean, lots and lots and lots of people read that Ferrante (and I'm guessing most liked it, because it's great!)

My challenge is going to be to not vote for each of the other Naples books

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 2012

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - 1

If it had been listed I probably would have voted for Train Dreams.