Vote for MobileRead's best fiction book of 1901-1910

[pdurrant]

The first voting thread for choosing the ten best fiction books of the 20th Century. This thread covers 1901-1910.

VOTING IS NOW OPEN. Voting totals will be hidden until the poll ends on 15th June 2015(so that no-one is influenced by previously recorded votes), and voting will be anonymous.

You are, of course, welcome to make your choice known during in the discussion thread associated with this poll.

The nominations and nominators are:

1. 1901 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), epub, mobi (pdurrant)
2. 1901 Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Gutenberg US (German), English eboook links (knuthmeyer)
3. 1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), epub, mobi (frddgls)
4. 1902 The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (1843-1916), epub, mobi (sun surfer)
5. 1902 The Virginian by Owen Wister (1860-1938), epub, mobi (GA Russell)
6. 1903 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1876-1916), epub, mobi (Synamon)
7. 1903 The Riddle of the Sands by Robert Erskine Childers (1870-1922), epub, mobi (bfisher)
8. 1903 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1959-1932), Gutenberg (gmw)
9. 1904 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1843-1916), epub, mobi (issybird)
10. 1904 Nostromo by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Gutenberg (everlod)
11. 1906 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), Gutenberg US, No authorised ebook (obs20)
12. 1906 The Psammead Trilogy by Edith Nesbit (1858-1924), epub, mobi, Gutenberg, Gutenberg (EndlessWaves)
13. 1906 The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain (1835-1910), Gutenberg, Gutenberg (spellbanisher)
14. 1907 Before Adam by Jack London (1876-1916), epub, mobi (Ralph Sir Edward)
15. 1908 Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), epub, mobi (BearMountainBooks)
16. 1910 The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946),Gutenberg US, Amazon UK, AU PD (Lynx-lynx)
17. 1910 Where Angels Fear to Tread by Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), Gutenberg US, No authorised ebook (ccowie)
18. 1910 Howards End by Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), Gutenberg US, Amazon UK (missimpossible)

All these books are in the USA public domain. For books in the European public domain, links are given to copies in our library, or elsewhere. Otherwise a link is given to the Project Gutenberg copy and to the title at Amazon UK.

Ideally, nominators should now post about their nominated book, and everyone is welcome to discuss the relative merits of the nominations

[Greg Anos]

Before Adam - Jack London.

A unique piece of early Science Fiction, and vastly entertaining, to boot.

What was it like to be Homo Habilis? Or Homo Erectus?

Jack London takes his great skills at writing animal fiction and crosses it with everything that was known about anthropology at the time.

Fiction, yes, but fiction that stretched your mind in 1907, and still does in 2015.

Give it a read...

[Apache]

Kim is a wonderful read and well worth reading again.
Apache

[Rizla]

Oops, I forgot to nominate The Iron Heel by Jack London. It influenced 1984. Oh, well.

[Rizla]

Who is The Jungle by?

The Psaemmead Trilogy is misspelled, not that it matters. The Enchanted Castle is Nesbit's better known work. The BBC did a version of it that was pretty creepy.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Rizla

The Psaemmead Trilogy is misspelled.

Fixed.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Rizla

Who is The Jungle by?

The Psaemmead Trilogy is misspelled, not that it matters. The Enchanted Castle is Nesbit's better known work. The BBC did a version of it that was pretty creepy.

Upton Sinclair

[gmw]

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, has always seemed to me to be a highly improbable book. It shouldn't work. The animal characters are sometimes animals, sometimes animals in human clothes, and sometimes human in all but skin. The adventures are at once mundane and outlandish. The story telling is at once childish and worldly. But it all works. It's funny, it's touching, it's light, it's deep. It is simply a wonderful story, beautifully told.

What I've read of its beginnings leads me to think that the existence of the book is even more improbable than even the content, but despite poor reviews when first released, it sold well - and continues to do so. Of all the books I know, I would be hard pressed to give you another example that has survived the passing of years as well as this one. This has not become a historical curiosity, of interest only to those that like old literature. This is still the wonderful tale it was when it first appeared to the world, and for all the same reasons.

The Jungle was a very influential book and help launch "muckraking journalism" in the United States. This led to many much needed reforms in food and drug safety, worker rights, and trust busting during the Progressive Era. That and Upton Sinclair could really write.

The Call of the Wild is certainly a entertaining book that has held up well. Jack London was a really contradictory character. Virulent racist. Anti-capitalist [The Iron Heel]. Champion of "rugged individualism." Truly an American author.

[curtw]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

The Jungle was a very influential book and help launch "muckraking journalism" in the United States. This led to many much needed reforms in food and drug safety, worker rights, and trust busting during the Progressive Era. That and Upton Sinclair could really write.

To provide a little more (disgusting) detail, the History Matters web site contains this description:

The book is best known for revealing the unsanitary process by which animals became meat products. Yet Sinclair’s primary concern was not with the goods that were produced, but with the workers who produced them. Throughout the book, as in this chapter, he described with great accuracy the horrifying physical conditions under which immigrant packing plant workers and their families worked and lived, portraying the collapse of immigrant culture under the relentless pressure of industrial capitalism. Despite his sympathies, as a middle-class reformer Sinclair was oblivious to the vibrancy of immigrant communities beyond the reach of bosses, where immigrants found solidarity and hope. Sinclair’s graphic descriptions of how meat products were manufactured were an important factor in the subsequent passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act in 1906. Sinclair later commented about the effect of his novel: "I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach."

[Lynx-lynx]

Richardson, Ethel Florence (Henry Handel) (1870–1946)

Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom is remarkable because it is one of few novels about a girl’s maturation that has come to be understood as a “classic” and also because it is ultimately a girls’ school story. HG Wells, who described the protagonist Laura Tweedle Rambotham as “an adorable little beast”, considered the book to be the best school story he’d ever read.

Set in the 1890s, but published in 1910, The Getting of Wisdom defiantly flouts the conventions of the British girls’ school story that were established by the first decades of the 20th century. Typically, a “new girl” confronts a school community in which she does not fit; after many trials she conforms to the system of rules among peers and teachers and is finally accepted. The once unruly or misunderstood girl caps off her first year with a victory for the school in a tennis tournament, or by acing her exams.

When Richardson, a female writer who wrote under a man’s name, transports a new girl from the country to the Ladies’ College in Melbourne, she sets about undermining the very concepts of unity, friendship, honesty, and diligence on which girls’ school stories depend.

Her crimes are many. Torn between a desire to belong and ambivalence about several of the girls around her, Laura concocts an enthralling tale about the happily married curate’s romantic interest in her. Desperate not to devastate her widowed mother, who has laboured and sacrificed to fund her daughter’s education, Laura seizes the opportunity to stuff a history book down her dress and cheat in one of her final exams. (Excerpt from: http://theconversation.com/the-case-...f-wisdom-23697)

This is a public domain book in Australia: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/ric.../henry_handel/

[mandy314]

For now my favorite is Nostromo.
But it is a strong list of books each rightly considered a classic in its own right. I have read 8 (for sure, perhaps even 2 more) of the books - not bad I think for English not being my first language. Some are known unknowns - read some others books by the author or heard about the book. A couple are unknown unknowns - and "The Virginian" is a definitely maybe read.
I must confess that a vote for Nostromo would be a vote more for the author than the book. If "The Secret Agent" had been nominated I more likely than not would have voted for that book. The main reason is: Conrad is an author I really do associate with the turn from the 19th to the 20th century - on the other hand Henry James I see as a 19th century author.

NB: Shouldn't Kim be disqualified as some parts of the books were published in 1900 (only joking of course).

[caleb72]

Unfortunately, I've only read two from the list: Buddenbrooks and Call of the Wild. I really enjoyed Thomas Mann's classic, but I thought Call of the Wild was marvellous and was on my list for this decade.

I really wish I had read more from the list though. The Getting of Wisdom has been on my TBR pile for a while now. And some of these: Conrad, James, Forster, could well fit into my "books I must read before I cark it" list. So I'll be voting without the benefit of reading some of these classics - but that's going to be the case all the way through the century I'm afraid.

[issybird]

Not surprisingly, I think my nomination, The Golden Bowl, surpasses the others, especially for the quality of its prose. I think the story has more heft than the other Jamesian nomination, The Wings of the Dove.

I've read 16 of the books, a percentage that will drop precipitously as the century advances. One of the unreads, The Riddle of the Sands, is already on my shortlist, so I'll try to get to it before the voting closes.

I have a soft spot for the hilarious Diaries of Adam and Eve and would be glad to see it win. Several of the others are also old favorites, but don't quite reach the threshold of "best." In some cases, the authors would make a best list with another book, especially Thomas Mann. I loved Buddenbrooks the first time I read it, but found it quite the slog the second time around. I prefer Jack London's nonfiction to his fiction and I've never warmed up to Forster, who is a good read of the second-rate variety in my books. The kidlit is all lovely, but kidlit is never going to make it past the post for me in this kind of poll.