one more round of self indulgence - Daniel_Rf's 50 favourite novels

i have read the following, love them all.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John LeCarré
The Haunting Of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Hunter, Richard Stark
Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck

pop 1280, perdido st station, the plague, and the magic mountain are at the very top of my "to-read" list

invisible man is probably the "best" one but i might just vote for the hunter because it is flawless and i tore through it in like 90 mins without stopping,

I love a lot of these. Mrs. D. is v v good, but not prime Woolf so I voted for Howards End (because that is prime Forster).

I liked it most out of the Woolfs I've read (To The Lighthouse, Jacob's Room - underrated!), but tbf I read it within the past five years, and the others when I was in my early 20's, so that might have something to do with it.

A handful I've read, a bunch I need to read. Ripley gets my vote, as Highsmith generally will.

from the ones i've read i'm torn between Tristram Shandy and Invisible Man

Enchanted April, Elizabeth Von Arnim

I read this last year, very enjoyable.

All this list makes me think is i wish I was a tenth as well read as you

Ditto, plus I wish I had more time to read books (as a colleague of mine recently remarked: "we're English professors; we don't have time to read books").

Of the 15 listed that I've read, I voted Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It barely edged out The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson.

Amazing list! I kept reading down it thinking "okay, I"ll definitely vote for that one," and then it would get bumped off the list by something even better. I'll have to go with The Plague, but I'm sorry to give up In A Lonely Place.

I don't like this European (English) tradition of putting the name of the book before the author or the film before the director or the song/album before the artist in lists. It makes it hard to search names and seems like a provocation to me.

That said, Mann's "The Magic Mountain", although a very difficult read, is for me the book of all books, and I'm voting for it. I also would vote for Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" or Lampedusa's "The Leopard"

I've read 8 of these I think and will put a bunch on my list, but I most recently have very fond memories of reading The Doomed City on a trip to Japan, love that one. It sent me on a Strugatsky binge but nothing quite lived up to it.

i will be checking a lot of these out! even considering the more well-known novels i've never read. personal lists from well-read folks here are a treasure. i discovered season of migration to the north by tayib salih from one of them, which was an amazing reading experience.

Several of these are on my tbr list. Not a big reader of literature but I have to vote for "Mrs. Dalloway", which kind of blew me away when I finally got around to reading it a couple of years ago. Never really read a book like it before. I don't know how to describe what moved me, it's probably just the most... skillfully written novel I've ever read, like she does these amazing things with framing and narrative shifts that must have just blown people away when it first came out. there's this... proto-cinematic (?) momentum to it, and Woolf writes like she invented the damn English language and is bringing everyone closer to it. Her greatness reminds me of like bach or nadia comaneci, someone in such a strong command of their medium that they brush up against the limits of expression. idk, it's really something.

A good few I haven’t read on this list but a really nice one, I remember reading Our Man in Havana as a teenager and finding it really funny, I haven’t read it since though, so curious to know if I still do. Vanity Fair is one of my favourite books of all time so that’s my pick, even if Thackeray thought Irish people were subhuman. Just a beautiful work. I’ll return to this poll for future reads I think.

Love the amount of pulp along with more of the classics.

Going with Pop 1280

Ah fuck I forgot Anthills Of The Savannah by Chinua Achebe.

All this list makes me think is i wish I was a tenth as well read as you

For what it's worth what I gain in breadth I lose in depth - Forster is I think the only author in here I've read everything by, and a lot of them I've only read the one book by. Case in point:

It sent me on a Strugatsky binge but nothing quite lived up to it.

:( was looking forward to them all being this good, though I guess Doomed City does have that masterpiece vibe.

I don't like this European (English) tradition of putting the name of the book before the author or the film before the director or the song/album before the artist in lists. It makes it hard to search names and seems like a provocation to me.

Gotta say I am baffled by this complaint. :) It's just how I've always made lists, in English and Portuguese, and no one has ever pointed out to me that it is somehow wrong or confusing - in fact I had no idea it was "European". Coming from a journalistic background putting the authors first seems counter intuitive - it's a list of books, you lead with the important bit, and frankly I do not understand how the positioning of the author name could make a ctrl f search harder or easier.

What's most baffling to me though is the idea that it's a "provocation". Against whom?? For what conceivable purpose???

Uh yeah, what's that all about?

I guess could kinda maybe see that argument if there were multiple books by the same author on the list — which there explicitly aren’t here — but still stfu nerd lol (that’s a provocation)

Lots here that I’ve been meaning to get around to for years and years. Loved mrs Dalloway but it’s been so long since I read it (at school!); spark but not read that one; queneau but for some reason I always resist picking up my English translation of Zazie. Of the ones I’ve read I might go hill house narrowly over invisible man and the hunter

For sure I'd include a Perceval Everett novel in my canon, probably Wounded.

Of these, the ones I have read and *really* liked are
Tristram Shandy
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
Fathers and Sons
The Hobbit
Pop 1280
Our Man in Havana
Solaris
The Plague
Memento Mori

Ones that I have read and think are very good:
Territory of Light
The Doomed City
The Trouble with Lichen

there are some that i didn't like, which i leave to one side, but plenty more that i just haven't read, so a very good list to have!

i would under normal circumstances auto-vote for the magic mountain but it’s also hard to resist voting for in a lonely place

it's a list of books, you lead with the important bit,

This is known as the auteur theory of books, iirc.

I've read fourteen and a half, many too long ago to have a strong opinion on but Excession, The Hobbit, Enchanted April, The Leopard, Solaris and The Magic Mountain are all favourites, I will probably vote The Magic Mountain, will certainly check out some others I haven't read.

Mrs Dalloway said she would list the name of the book first herself

The enthusiasm for Mann on ILX was a tonic so many years ago. I felt like a genuine weirdo loving The Magic Mountain and Joseph and His Brothers. "Tonio Kröger" played a part in my coming out.

Vanity Fair is one of my favourite books of all time so that’s my pick, even if Thackeray thought Irish people were subhuman. Just a beautiful work.

Yeah I learned about this from previous posts of yours. I guess not that surprising for a privileged brit of the time but urgh.

:( was looking forward to them all being this good, though I guess Doomed City does have that masterpiece vibe.

Well, I'd already read Roadside Picnic so I'm not counting that (should go back to it though, I read it absolute ages ago). I read Hard to Be a God, Monday Begins on Saturday, and The Tale of the Troika, all of which were worth reading but didn't have the same magic for me.

Ones I liked (with favorites at the top):
The Haunting Of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
In A Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes
The Plague, Albert Camus
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Siege Of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

Ones I didn't like:
Captains Of The Sands, Jorge Amado

Voted Their Eyes Were Watching God just over Invisible Man, and it might be because of the way she makes the crowd a character, in a way that most American novelists don't, or didn't---more about the dynamics than The Crowd As Asshole, IM doesn't do it as much or in the same way as Their Eyes... does, or not enough to win my vote, quite. And it's folk-art-pop-art, run paint run run! Between the lightning. (Ellison is jazzier, great too.)

(Have not read several of these, didn't get far into Shandy.)

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I've only read six of these, from which it's hard for me to choose a favor, but I'll pick the Lonely Londoners because it's what I read most recently and want to show it some love

I would love to know about some of D's favs that are hard to find in English, or even that haven't been translated

It's just Portuguese authors, tbh.

Directa, Nuno Bragança - Great resistance novel about smuggling a political dissident across the border. It's also a One Crazy Night book ("estar de directa" is Portuguese slang for staying awake all night) that provides a fascinating glimpse into Lisbon nightlife during the dictatorship; I particularly remember the main character driving to the airport at like 7am and the airport bar being full of party people who went there because it's the only place open. Bragança is an interesting case, he wrote with this kind of Hemingwayian romanticism but was also very politically militant - after the revolution he actually joined a fringe far left militia.

Raíz Comovida, Cristovão de Águiar - The definitive novel about growing up in S Miguel. Written in local dialect, even my mainland friends needed a glossary so I have no idea how one would go about translating it. Most memorable bit: the main character is crying because his favourite calf is about to be slaughtered, and a well meaning aunt tries to comfort him with "Listen my dear child, everything dies. You'll die too, some day." Which of course launches him from grief into full blown existential meltdown.

O Susto, Agustina Bessa-Luís - Agustina was the implacable chronicler of the Portuguese upper class and its many sins. Incredibly dense prose, the kind where you could just read a sentence a day and be left with much to think about. This is, I think, her masterpiece, a fictionalised account of the life of the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, whom she had met and by all accounts deeply admired, and yet it is absolutely scathing about him, about his family and about the social world he moved in. I truly believe that if she received a push Agustina might become a hip name in world literature, she's so great and so unique. Manoel de Oliveira's Abraham's Valley is an adaptation of one of her novels - actually it's a bit more complicated, Oliveira asked Agustina specifically to write a novel for him to adapt.

Histórias do Fim da Rua, Mário Zambujal - What Bill Forsyth is to Scotland, or perhaps what Jean Sheperd was to the US at one point, Mário Zambujal was to Portugal. His novels often featured crime fiction elements, but really they were the best distillation I've ever read about what life in Portugal is *actually* like, the day to day wit and worries of ordinary people. Full of wordplay, warmth and wisdom. He passed away a few weeks ago, I will miss picking up his latest when I go back to Portugal.

Eliete, Dulce Maria Cardoso - Cardoso broke through with the translated-into-English The Return (O Retorno), a book written from the perspective of a young kid whose family is fleeing back to Portugal after Angola gained its independence. The issue of these ex-colonialists - known and spurned as "retornados" - is as you might imagine a spiky one, but Cardoso doesn't try to justify her own family's background in this class as anything other than what it was (racist settler colonialism). Anyway, I much prefer Eliete, which is about a bougie middle aged woman letting boredom drive her to the dating apps, many shenanigans follow. I often recommend it as "the real housewives of Cascais".

I also deeply love the novels of Júlio Dinís, particularly Morgadinha dos Canaviais and Uma Família Inglesa. A 19th century author that occupies, I guess, a similar place to Jane Austen, though without Austen's sharp eye for the economics of marriage. Morgadinha is an ode to rural Portugal, while Família Inglesa is his only novel to take place in a city, and extra beloved because that city is Porto (if you think London or Paris loom too large in their country's cultural output, try finding five Portuguese novels with an urban setting that isn't Lisbon!). There's just this warm cosiness to these books, the kind of writing where you'll happily take a page long description of the food layout during a Christmas dinner.

Some of these titles will be available in French, don't think any of them are in English.

ooh should vote here

Read these, liked all of them

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John LeCarré
The Buddah Of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi
The Plague, Albert Camus
Zazie In The Metro, Raymond Queneau
Mrs.Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

Probably going with Zazie, as doubt anyone else is.

It's just Portuguese authors, tbh.

I figured, and reading your write-up made my morning, so thank you!

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