Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novel Of The 1920's

First one of these where I've read enough to cast a vote. It's between Wodehouse and Thomas Mann for me I think. Joyce, Woolf and Doblin also good.

This is a surprisingly tough choice for me because Ulysses and Nadja are more or less equally embedded in my psyche

I might give Nadja the edge today and not just cos it's easier to carry around in my pocket

Nadja was the first flaneur narrative I read and I'm grateful to the college professor who assigned it.

The finalists:

To the Lighthouse
The Age of Innocence
The Good Soldier
Ulysses
Decline and Fall
Nadja

Švejk not to be confused with the other good soldier obv

Great list of books, but it's Ulysses, obv.

Throwing in a vote for Hasek

I've read half of these. This was a really good decade. But surely Ulysses stands alone.

Faulkner and both Kafkas not even mentioned yet which says something about what a solid list this is

An incredible decade. So much here in terms of variety (Waugh, Wodehouse and Lawrence)

An incredible decade. So much here in terms of variety

Twice!

fond memories of the faulkner though i only read it once and nothing else by him. didn't finish ulysses, defeated by the oxen of the sun, i'm minded to try again soon. wharton great, woolf fine, voting for the trial though.

"Time Passes" from To the Lighthouse is one of the best things ever written in English.

Some hideous gaps here for me. I'm going to divide the ones I haven't read into three:

Ones I intend to read: The Age Of Innocence, To The Lighthouse, The Good Soldier Švejk

Ones I might read ('might' because I'm either a) scared of it or b) worried I don't have the capacity any more): Ulysees, The Magic Mountain, Nadja, Berlin Alexandersplatz

Ones I'm pretty much resigned to not reading: The Sound And The Fury, Lady Chatterley,

I've read at least five of these (perhaps appropriately, I don't remember if I finished The Castle. This is hands-down Berlin Alexanderplatz, which has all the scope of Joyce but ranks a lot higher in human interest. Don't watch the Fassbinder series and think it's a suitable substitute, it's a middling adaptation.

In contrast, the Scorsese movie is quite a good version of the Wharton novel.

I'm not a fan of the series either. I haven't read the novel.

Lawrence isn't popular 'round here, but he wrote several books better than Lady Chatterly's Lover.

Hey 5 people voted for Lawrence in the last poll and surely they weren't all just trying to get a rise out of me

I voted for The Rainbow but don't have any interest in reading this Lawrence.

truthfully it's Ulysses, but I can't not vote for The Castle

DALLOWAY

I do really love age of innocence but DAAAAAAALLLLLLLLOOOOOOOWAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY

Dalloway?

Don't watch the Fassbinder series and think it's a suitable substitute, it's a middling adaptation.

Yeah, last episode excluded it's very social realist, while the novel does all sorts of stylistic shifts.

Dalloway lost to Kafka in its year poll, though horseshoe did vote for it then as well so fair play!

The protagonist of Elif Batuman’s novel “Either/Or” is semi-obsessed with “Nadja”, which she is assigned in a college literature class. It made me curious to read it.

The first novel I read with photos and art. It blew 19-year-old me away.

My favorite is The Magic Mountain, a magical philosophical novel where the reader becomes central to the story

The Magic Mountain. I reread it last year, it still holds up and is miles beyond anything else he has written (Buddenbrooks, Dr Faustus, even Death in Venice being all tedious to some extent).

If I had a triple vote, I would have cast the others towards Age of Innocence and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

There are only four I haven't read (including the Faulkner).

Top picks I would add to the list are Svevo (Zeno's Conscience), Zamyatin (We), Mofolo (Chaka), Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog)... Super rich decade

My adds would be Henry Green's Blindness and Living.
My friends and I, boys and girls, read Lady Chatterly's Lover in high school, agreed that it was trey sweet as well as hot, age-appropriately to us--then we went to college and had to read some of his other novels.

But he did have a way of turning up, with some short stories, travel writing (as Alfred mentioned recently), also relating to/getting excited about what he read as rebellious nullity in early Hemingway---also some very DH pomes, like this one from the Mott gatefold LP:

A Sane Revolution
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.

Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.

Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.

Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.

Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!

I've only read Psmith and Decline. I didn't like Decline, don't enjoy Waugh, and Psmith is one of my favourite Wodehouses, so I don't feel embarrassed to vote for it (even though it's likely not the best book here).

Psmith is unusual for Wodehouse, in that he has some measure of moral self-awareness, as opposed to being a likeable idiot -- but he's still a very memorable character. I wish there were more Psmith books.

Psmith is a perfectly creditable choice among these books. It's a pinnacle within the works of a master.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

Wharton a surprise, but I guess she already won one of these.

Glad I went with Breton

Could I read the Psmith novels in any order like the Jeeves series?

Yes.

Psmith first appears as a secondary character in some hard-to-find early Wodehouse novels that center around a fictional English public school called Wryken which spend most of their attention on a clean, upstanding young cricket player named Tom. By accident my first Wodehouse novel was Mike at Wryken, because my local public library had an ancient re-bound copy and most of the other Wodehouse were checked out. Later on Wodehouse realized Psmith was pure gold and started to feature him in novels of his own. I'm glad I first glimpsed him in his embryonic form.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novel Of The 1930's

Go with "Leave it to Psmith" first, it really is wonderful and stands alone. The others are lesser but still fun, especially "Psmith, Journalist".

Checked it out of the library.

it's also a Blandings Castle novel, which is a rich seam to say the least

My assumption is that everything from the mid-1910s up to (and including) "Joy in the morning" is worth checking out, and everything that comes after is... variable. I haven't read "Mating Season" though.

I enjoyed Uncle Fred In Springtime. Uncle Fred is to the manor born, and alarmingly wants to help, thus approaching a Bizarro World Jeevesdom.