If you read only one book this decade, come and post it on the ILX BOOK OF THE 00s: NOMINATION THREAD (nominations close 20 December)

What’s this all about?

It’s the ILX ‘best books of the decade’ poll. I’m looking for the books that have done it for you this decade. Whatever you loved, used, laughed at or curled up in bed with – I want to hear about it.

Cool. What can I nominate?

You can NOMINATE ANYTHING you like. I mean it – fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry, biography, reference, history, cookbooks or whatever, I’ll take ‘em all.

There are two rules. It must be:
(a) a book – comics, blogs, journalism, etc don’t qualify unless they have appeared in book form; and
(b) first published in 2000 or later.

There is ONE EXCEPTION – earlier foreign-language works qualify if their first English translation was published in 2000 or later.

Okay. How many nominations do I get?

You can nominate up to FIVE books of any genre. Anyone who reaches five then gets the option of nominating THREE BONUS BOOKS – but the bonus nominations CANNOT be novels.

Or to put it another way, you can nominate up to eight books, of which up to five can be novels.

That’s not very many.

No, it isn’t. You’ll be able to vote for more than that when the time comes - but reading isn’t by nature the same communal experience that music is, so I’m trying to keep numbers down to make sure there’ll be enough overlap to get a sensible hierarchy into the final results.

But to start things off I’ve used what are your favourite novels post-2000?">this thread as an open nominations thread. Everything mentioned on there is nominated automatically. (Those posters can still use their full quota of nominations – which may not be fair, but they can consider it their reward for keeping ILB going all these years.) I’ve also thrown in the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Awards and the Booker Prize. I’d add the top 10 bestsellers of the decade too if I could find a reliable source. I’ll put up the starting list in the next post.

Righto. What do I do now?

Get thinking. Then post your nominations here. Use this format:

Author’s name – Book name – (year)

You MUST include all three of these. It took me forever to check everything on the other thread, I’m not doing that again.

Thanks!

Nominations list so far (A-J):

Andre Aciman - Call Me By Your Name (2009)
Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger (2008)
Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital (2006)
Cesar Aira - An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter (2006)
Cesar Aira – Ghosts (2009)
Rabih Alameddine - The Hakawati (2008)
Monica Ali - Brick Lane (2003)
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin (2000)


Nicholson Baker - A Box Of Matches (2003)
Nicholson Baker – Checkpoint (2004)
John Banville - The Sea (2005)
Robert Bingham - Lightning On The Sun (2000)
Roberto Bolaño
 - 2666 (2008)
Roberto Bolaño - Savage Detectives (2007)

T.C. Boyle – Tooth & Claw (2006)
Michael Bracewell - Perfect Tense (2001)
Geraldine Brooks – March (2005)
Shannon Burke - Black Flies (2008)

Peter Carey – The True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)
Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)
Paulo Coelho - The Devil And Miss Prym (2000)
Jm Coetzee - Diary Of A Bad Year (2007)
Jm Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello
 (2003)
Daniel Coshnear - Jobs And Other Preoccupations (2001)

Mark Danielewski - House Of Leaves (2000)
Samuel Delany - Dark Reflections (2007)
Kieran Desai – The Inheritance of Loss (2006)
Junot Diaz - The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007)
Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome (2007)
Roddy Doyle – Oh, Play That Thing! (2004)
Tom Drury - The Driftless Area (2006)
Maggie Dubris - Weep Not My Wanton (2002)

Jean Echenoz – I’m Off (2001)
James Elroy - Cold Six Thousand (2001)
Anne Enright – The Gathering (2007)
Steven Erikson - Memories Of Ice (2005)
Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex (2004)
Percival Everett – Erasure (2001)

Sebastian Faulks - On Green Dolphin Street (2002)
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections (2001)

Mary Gaitskill – Veronica (2005)
Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances (2008)
Julia Glass – Three Junes (2002)
Myla Goldberg - Bee Season (2000)
Olga Grushin - The Dream Life Of Sukhanov (2006)

Steven Hall - The Raw Shark Texts (2007)
Shirley Hazzard – The Great Fire (2003)
Aleksandar Hemon – Nowhere Man (2002)
Sheila Heti – Ticknor (2005)
Andrew Holleran – Grief (2006)
Alan Hollinghurst - The Line Of Beauty (2004)
Michel Houellebecq – The Elementary Particles/Atomised (2000)
Michel Houellebecq - Platform
 (2003)
Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved (2003)

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go (2005)

Denis Johnson – The Tree of Smoke (2007)
Edward P Jones - The Known World (2003)
Susanna Jones - The Missing Person's Guide To Love (2008)

(K-Z)

Chris Killen - The Bird Room (2009)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai - The Melancholy Of Resistance (2000)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War And War (2006)
Andrei Kurkov - Death And The Penguin (2001)

J Robert Lennon - Pieces For The Left Hand (2006)
Jonathan Lethem - Fortress Of Solitude (2003)
Sam Lipsyte – Homeland
 (2004)
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Feast Of The Goat (2001)

Colum McCann – Let The Great World Spin (2009)
Cormac McCarthy – The Road (2006)
Tom McCarthy - Remainder
 (2007)
Nick McDonell – Twelve (2003)
Ian McEwan – Saturday (2005)
Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall (2009)
Ben Marcus - Notable American Women (2002)
Yann Martel – Life Of Pi (2001)
George Martin - Storm Of Swords (2000)
Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country (2008)
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green (2006)
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (2004)
Toni Morrison - A Mercy (2008)
Toni Morrison – Love (2003)
Walter Mosley - The Man In My Basement (2004)
Alice Munro – Runaway (2005)
Haruki Murakami - Kafka On The Shore (2005)

Patrick Neate - City Of Tiny Lights (2005)

Joseph O'Neill – Netherland (2008)

Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Red (2001)
Orhan Pamuk – Snow (2004)
Ann Patchett - Bel Canto (2001)
David Peace - GB84 (2004)
Jack Pendarvis – Awesome (2008)
Eliot Perlman - 7 Types Of Ambiguity (2004)
Fernando Pessoa - Book Of Disquiet (2001)
DBC Pierre – Vernon God Little (2003)
Salvador Plascencia - The People Of Paper (2005)
Richard Powers - The Echo Maker (2006)
Richard Price - Lush Life (2008)
Thomas Pynchon - Against The Day (2006)

Jonathan Raban – Surveillance (2006)
Marilynne Robinson – Gilead (2004)
Philip Roth - The Human Stain (2000)
Phillip Roth - The Plot Against America (2004)
Richard Russo – Empire Falls (2001)

Ian Sansom - Ring Road (2004)
Edward St Aubyn - Mothers Milk (2006)
W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz (2001)
Jim Shepard - Project X (2004)
Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan (2006)
Gary Shteyngart - Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003)
Hubert Selby Jr - Waiting Period (2002)
Stacy Sims - Swimming Naked (2004)
Rebecca Smith - A Bit Of Earth (2007)
Zadie Smith - Autograph Man (2002)
Zadie Smith - On Beauty (2005)
Elizabeth Strout – Olive Kitteridge (2001)

Colm Toibin – Brooklyn (2009)
Colm Toibin - The Master (2004)
William Trevor – Love and Summer (2009)
Lily Tuck – The News From Paraguay (2004)

Enrique Vila-Matas - Bartleby & Co. (2005)

William Vollman - Europe Central (2005)
William Vollman - The Royal Family (2000)

Sarah Waters – Fingersmith (2002)
Sarah Waters – The Night Watch (2006)
Colson Whitehead - Sag Harbor (2009)
Jincy Willett - Winner Of The National Book Award (2003)
Tim Winton – Breath (2008)
Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths (2001)
Tobias Wolff - Old School (2003)

(non-fiction)

Anne Applebaum - Gulag: A History (2004)
Herbert P. Bix - Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (2001)
Douglas A. Blackmon - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2009)
Kevin Boyle - Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004)
Robert A. Caro - Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2002)
Steve Coll - Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2005)

Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Timothy Egan - The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006)
Carlos Eire - Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003)
Caroline Elkins - Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2006)
Saul Friedlander - The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (2008)
Annette Gordon-Reed - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008)
Diane McWhorter - Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2002)
Samantha Power - "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2003)
Andrew Solomon - The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (2001)
T. J. Stiles - The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (2009)
Tim Weiner - Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007)
Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2007)

thanks for taking the time 2 do this

No problem - I just hope people still read books, what with fancy new computer games and television and all.

Small html error - this is the thread I used as the open nomination thread. I think some of these were actually mentioned for being terrible novels - Jonathan Safran Foer can count himself lucky to be on here!

I read like 98% non-fiction, these were my favorites, fuiud, etc:

Taylor Branch - At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (2006)
Michael Lewis - The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (2006)
Evan Wright - Generation Kill (2004)

1. Nobody reads poetry. Sad.

2. Whoever nominated 'Twelve' needs head examination.

3. Thanks for doing this!!!

I can rectify the poetry situation by nominating:

Keston Sutherland - Hot White Andy
Keston Sutherland - Stress Position

Don't mind giving up two nomination places as I'm not sure I can think of many others. Maybe a couple of non-fiction/philosophy books, but the only novels I can think of to nominate are already there.

chabon - yiddish policemen's union
zadie smith - white teeth

Poetry

John Burnside - The Asylum Dance (2000)
John Burnside - The Light Trap (2002)
Ciaran Carson - The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (2002)
Paul Farley - The Ice Age (2002)
Mark Halliday - Jab (2002)
Christopher Logue - War Music (2001)
Christopher Logue - Cold Calls (2005)
Sean O'Brien - Downriver (2001)
Alice Oswald - Dart (2002)
Don Paterson - Landing Light (2003)
Don Paterson - Orpheus (2007)
Hugo Williams - Dear Room (2006)

really cool idea imo

Remember to include the year, please! I don't want to have to verify everything myself.

Inherent Vice (Pynchon, obvs) is currently missing, right? That's an obvious ilx favourite.
I'll think properly & come up with some things tomorrow (including poetry I'd expect).
emil.y - Is Sutherland that good? I've only read Antifreeze, and it felt a bit in the shadow of Prynne, so I didn't pursue.

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (2003)

Gulag, slavery, extermination, genocide, depression... It's the Fun Bunch.

Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007)

I had a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with another such biography recently, it was so much work. Being biased, I'll leave it out.

Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

That one's up there.

I don't know that much of Prynne's work, to be honest (although I did go to a couple of seminars with him last year, so I feel a bit guilty about not really reading him), so I can't compare very well, but there's definitely a strong influence, yeah. However, I'd completely recommend Stress Position on its own terms - it is blindingly good. He's also one of the only poets that has ever really convinced me that poetry should be heard as well as read, ha.

xpost to woofwoofwoof - it seems to have taken me ages to write what is mostly gibberish, sorry.

Oh, and the years are 2007 and 2009 for Hot White Andy and Stress Position respectively, Ismael.

Man, if this poll had come out before Christmas I could of got some good gifts for people. The only new books I've read (or listened to) from this decade were Harry Potter books, a Michael Crichton book (on tape), a Dan Brown book, and a graphic novel. I won't be nominating Harry Potter, Crichton or Dan Brown so "you're welcome". (and there is a nominations thread in I Love Comics for the good graphic novel I read)

Mati Unt - Things in the Night (2006)

Get them up there anyway - the list won't be complete with The Da Vinci Code

Peter Ackroyd - London, the Biography (2001)
Peter Ackroyd - Thames: Sacred River (2008)
David Kynaston - Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (2007)
David Kynaston - Family Britain, 1951-1957 (Tales of a New Jerusalem) (2009)

dean young poems - LET ME TYPE THEM TO YOU

i made this^ thread so i could nom all his 00 stuff but i'll stick with:

Dean Young - Skid (2002)
Dean Young - Beloved Infidel (2004)
Dean Young - Elegy on a Toy Piano (2005)

xxp I read The Symbol which had to of been much worse than The Da Vinci Code

xp those can be my 3 bonus, here'er some regular noms

Miranda July - No one belongs here more than you (2007)
Arthur Phillips - The egyptologist (2004)
Kevin Moffett - Permanent Visitors (2006)
Kate Christensen - The Epicure's Lament (2004)
David Foster Wallace - Oblivion (2004)

Sorry, the Taleb is (2001).

Want to read Austerity Britain.

I was really taken with the idea of the Kynaston ones, but when I had a look at them they seemed like they would be tough going somehow.

Mati Unt - Things in the Night (2006)

loooool

amy hempel - collected stories (2006)
alice munro - hateship, friendship, loveship, courtship, marriage (2001)
mircea cărtărescu - nostalgia (2005)
tatyana tolstaya - white walls: collected stories (2007)
adam haslett - you are not a stranger here (2002)

George Saunders - Pastoralia (2000)

omg emil.y you have been CONVERTED! awesome.

i uh don't really have anything to put here. i am a terrible, terrible reader.

Fiction:

Tibor Fischer - Under the Frog (2001)
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
Peter Watts - Blindsight (2006)

Non-Fiction

Satyajit Das - Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006)
Jared Diamond - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004)
Simon Sebag Montefiore - Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003)
David Quammen - Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (2003)
Mary Roach - Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003)

Everytime I checked a copyright, I discovered more favored books were published in 1997-9. This decade has sort of blown past me, as I spent more evenings with technical works, or catching up with the canon. Even if you aren't employed in finance, that Das book is the funniest non-fiction book on Wall St. I've encountered, though full comprehension requires some (lots) of caffeine though little math.

Everytime I checked a copyright, I discovered more favored books were published in 1997-9

I was finding something similar - I think it's more common for books than albums to be slow burners - there are probably a few decade-definers that won't make our poll because they just haven't been noticed yet. I did consider a grace period to allow some of 98 or 99's classics to qualify, but decided against it as it'd look a bit stupid if Motherless Brooklyn or American Pastoral ended up as the 00's #1!

rip it up and start again - simon reynolds
the shock doctrine - naomi klein

Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Irene Nemirovsky - Suite Francaise (1942 / 2004)
Gore Vidal - Inventing A Nation (2004)
Dave Eggers - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections (2001)
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex (2002)
Francis Wheen - How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (2004)
Jung Chang and John Halliday - Mao: The Unknown Story (2005)

Think a couple of those may already be up there somewhere.

T

Kavalier & Clay, Corrections and Middlesex have been covered. You can nominate three more should you wish (no restrictions, assuming that 'Inventing A Nation' is non-fiction).

Essential history:

Ron Chernow - Alexander Hamilton
Rick Perlstein - Nixonland
James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

History's good. It strikes me as the kind of genre where it might be difficult to get consensus about what's good and what's not, and so ultiamtely it might not figure highly - but yes, it should certainly be represented.

nominating because they're absent: i cannot be bound to this as a statement of favourites:

anna funder - stasiland - 2004
michelle goldberg - the means of reproduction - 2009
jose saramago - death with interruptions - 2008
patrik ourednik - europeana - 2005
philip roth - everyman - 2005
ray carney ed./john cassavetes - cassavetes on cassavetes - 2001

most of these i read in the past year, and i'm inherently suspicious of anything i made my mind up about 3+ years ago (like i have memories of watching cassavetes films as a 18 year old thinking BORING, and of thinking leon was a masterpiece)

Benjamin Kunkel- Indescision (2005)
Walter Yetnikoff and David Ritz- Howling at the Moon (2004)

China Miéville - The Scar
Iain M. Banks - Look to Windward
Alex Ross - The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century
Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

(I haven't actually read the last two on my list (yet), but every book from this decade that I've read has been nommed already. Just thought those two needed to be counted)

That's some good work. There are quite a lot of big name books missing. I had a quick think last night and counted more than twenty - five of which have been picked up in the last hour, so well done all.

Excellent initiative Ismael! Well done! I think most of the fiction I would put on my list has already been nominated. As I understand it we will get the opportunity to vote for our favourites later on and at this stage we are simply nominating books to go on to the shortlist.

On the fiction front I will put forward:

- John Updike - Rabbit Remembered (a novella within the collection "Licks of Love") (2001).

I'm delighted to be able to do so given the fact that I think the Rabbit stories as a whole, going back to "Rabbit, Run" published way back in 1960, represent the most rewarding and well written fiction I've read.

That leaves a gap in the non-fiction category, to which I would add:

- Daniel Yergin, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power" (2009);*
- Malcolm Gladwell, "Outliers" (2009);
- Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion" (2006);
- Yoram Dinstein, "War, Aggression and Self-Defence" (2003);
- Niall Ferguson, "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" (2005);
- Niall Ferguson, "Empire: How Britain made the Modern World" (2004); and
- David Plotz, "Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous and Inspiring Things i Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible" (2009).

That takes me up to my maximum of eight nominations I think.

At the moment I would plump for Roth's "Human Stain" and "The Plot Against America", Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty", Updike's "Rabbit Remembered", Yergin's "The Prize", Feguson's "Colossus" and Gladwell's "Outliers" in my top ten books of the naughties.

* This book was first published in 1991. However, I have included the book because a new and updated edition was published in 2009, with additional chapters etc.

another:
studs terkel - will the circle be unbroken - 2001

would happily nominate both this and hope dies last but am allowing for one more thing i've forgotten

... and there's another clutch of those omissions. DavidM beat you by a few minutes with The God Delusion, Red, so you have one more nomination (and possibly two - I happen to have The Prize in my to-read pile, and will have a look to see if the 2009 additions are substantial enough for it to qualify).

There will be a separate voting thread to come once nominations are closed, yes. It will be by private ballot, so keep schtum - although I will not frown upon a certain amount of lobbying!

when are nominations closing?

Close on Sunday. I didn't specify a time, so for the benefit of far-flung time zones I'll just close the thread off when I get up on Monday morning. I'll set the voting thread up immediately.

Meaning Sunday 20th/Monday 21st December. 2009, that is. AD, for the avoidance of any doubt.

Chalres Burns - Black Hole - 2005

Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories - 2008
Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor - Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq - 2006

Maan. I was hoping to look at bookshelves before I nominated. I think anything I can actually think of has been taken care of.

I was going to canvas views on that, actually. I think Tuomas's model for the 80s albums poll worked really well - thirty votes each with a long tail of points, so it went something like 40-30-25-20-15-12-10-9-8-a clutch of single figures for the lesser places.

Thirty's too many for books, but I thought twenty might be about right - that way voracious readers get proper representation, while for those with six or seven books it doesn't matter so much because it's only the single figure scores that'd go unallocated. I haven't worked out the precise weightings yet. I've no idea how popular this poll is going to be either, so allowing a large number of votes might be useful to help distinguish the lower places on the poll - I don't want a thirty-way-tie for twentieth place, all with one vote each!

I thought of another solution to a logjam low down - a requirement that a book get two or three separate votes before it qualifies (or only scores half-points until then). That'd only be useful in certain circumstances which I wouldn't know until the votes were in, so I'll file that option under 'dealer's prerogative' for now and deploy it only if the chart starts to look stupid.

Can we have a bonus-vote-for-a-not-a-novel work?

How'd you mean?

upon my actually checking, Dean Young - Beloved Infidel (2004), was only reprinted in 04, published in 92 so take it out & if i give it some thought i can probably come up with a replacement good non-fiction nom

Many thanks, Johnny, very helpful.

IK i hadn't really thought it through, I just thought - like with the nominations - if there was some kind of vote reserved for Something That Isn't A Novel it might make the shape of the results more interesting

That's a thought, thomp. Not sure whether it's necessary though. The list is approximately two-thirds fiction, one-third not, and an awful lot of the fiction was taken from the other thread so it may have no popular support here. What do you reckon? I'm all for the final chart being as interesting as possible.

I'm not sure about the bonus vote for non-fiction: I think if you like something enough you'll place it high anyway, and if you don't then you, uh, won't.

Sliding-scale scores have definitely worked, and I like the idea of no minimum number of books (or a small minimum, maybe 3 as an arbitrary cut-off?) - I don't think that having read only a small number of books from a certain decade should disqualify you from voting, as you can't read a book as quickly and easily as you can listen to an album. Also, those of us who have been in full-time education for much of the decade have enormous reading lists that curtail the time we get for contemporary stuff. People who have read more than me should probably confer over whether the maximum should be 20 or 30.

Tend to agree. On one hand, novels probably do have a natural advantage in that they're more likely to manage to snowball into a communal experience and thereby attract larger numbers of votes (even that doesn't necessarily translate into high scoring). Then again, I can think of a few non-fiction books that managed the same thing but haven't even been nominated.

ok i will nom this, ppl should check it out even if they dont care abt wrastlin' ~ Matthew Randazzo V - Ring of Hell (2008)

here's where i learned abt it: "Ring of Hell", a new book about Chris Benoit going nuts

20 sounds about right. Have an awful vision of me padding the bottom of my ballot with Oscar Wao ('My friends say it's my kind of thing. I bet I'd like it') & other books I haven't technically read if it's many more than that. I get the impression my position is fairly common round ILB at least - I read a lot, but not that much from this decade.

Johnny: awesome nomination (never heard of it, of course). I may as well reveal my other idea for voting - I'm going to be quite strict about demanding a few blurbs with each ballot to include in the countdown. Basically because I want to be able to use the results thread as a reading list, so it'd be great to pack as much positivism in there as possible.

woofwoofwoof: yeah, that sounds plausible. I'm cool with things picking up votes e.g. because somebody liked the film (plot is a massive part of any book, after all). But not so much if it gets a vote just because it generated a lot of hype - some of my most miserable reading experiences have come about that away. I'm looking at you, Tim Lott - White City Blue (2000).

i have been going through amazon orders to see what i might have read this decade. it's an incredibly depressing way to look at your past. also ha i have made 101 orders this year. not ordered 101 items, made 101 orders.

j.k. rowling, harry potter novels (2000, 2003, 2005, 2007)*
tsugumi ohba and takeshi obata, death note (serialized in japan '03-'06; 12 volumes released in english '05-'07)
bryan lee o'malley, scott pilgrim (five volumes, '04-'07 and '09)**
linda williams, ed., porn studies (2004)***
david st. john and cole swensen, eds., american hybrid: a norton anthology of new poetry**** (2009)
george saunders, the brief and frightening reign of phil / in persuasion nation***** (2006)
emmanuel carrére, i am alive and you are dead: a journey into the mind of philip k. dick****** (2005)

*thought about also nominating dan brown and stephanie meyer - the latter of whom i haven't even read - but didn't have space. if i have to pick one of rowling's i'll go for harry potter and the goblet of fire, 2000, because i think it's the point where the hype really gets a lead on the quality - otoh i don't think there's any point in considering them separately /:
**probably the two most 00s comics i can think of? if i have to pick one volume of the latter scott pilgrim gets it together, 2007.
***wanted at least one academic thing, and the only other one i remember buying is fredric jameson's archaeologies of the future. porn studies is a lot more interesting than archaeologies of the future.
****kind of a frustrating botch job of an anthology, but i wasn't sure what else to pick, poetry-wise. i thought maybe of christopher logue's war music (2000) - but that's a collection, re-edited, of stuff from the 80s and 90s - so enhh
***** actually one book in england. if you want to stick to authorial-intention one book, just in persuasion nation, which came out the same year, america.
******not even sure i'll bother voting for this. but my other seventh choice (your face tomorrow i er actually haven't read yet)

i have made 101 orders this year. not ordered 101 items, made 101 orders

Bloody hell!

His are all from the thriftstore but, nonetheless, you and scott should go book by book.

"20 sounds about right. Have an awful vision of me padding the bottom of my ballot with Oscar Wao ('My friends say it's my kind of thing. I bet I'd like it') & other books I haven't technically read if it's many more than that. I get the impression my position is fairly common round ILB at least - I read a lot, but not that much from this decade."

I agree with woofwoofwoof's sentiment above. I also read a fair amount but mostly from decades before the naughties. I think 20 should be the very highest number and would probably prefer 10. If it's any more than ten then you wouldn't be getting the crème-de-la-crème of the naughties and it would start to include stuff that's very good but undeserving of such attention.

I think Ismael also has a point that we don't want "a thirty-way-tie for twentieth place, all with one vote each". However, the graded long tail of points should counter act that to a great extent. Another way of doing so is to invite friends to participate. The larger number of voters taking part the less likely we are to have thirty way ties and the more variable the individual tallies will be on a graded points system.

We don't have much foreign language literature nominated that's been published in English, do we?

If it's any more than ten then you wouldn't be getting the crème-de-la-crème of the naughties and it would start to include stuff that's very good but undeserving of such attention.

Well, yes, but we're talking about a maximum of 20. So if someone has been voraciously reading literature of this decade, they may well love 20 books and think them all worthy of inclusion. And as long as there's no pressure to submit the maximum, others should theoretically include only as many as they see fit.

The updated nominations list

We're currently at 323 books, of which 196 are novels. Some serious good work going on, things have cranked up a gear in the last 48 hours. Many thanks all.

I'd be happy to run with the list as it stands now, but there are two days to go - so get thinking, heeldraggers. Most of what I'd really wanted to see nominated has already been entered, and I'll be able to pick up about half of the (to me) obvious omissions when I do my own nominations.

My impression was that we're not doing badly for translated literature. There are at least twenty that I recognise on a quick scan, but the list has expanded way beyond what I'm familiar with and the actual total is probably nearer double that. There're only two translations that I think are obvious omissions now (neither of which I have read). They're really, really, really popular books, should anyone have slots to fill and be looking for a hint!

can i nominate

j.m. coetzee - youth (2002)

please thx

Good work, that saves me a place.

I've worked out the points system, in case we have any stat geeks reading.

There will be twenty votes each. In an ordered ballot, distribution will be:
40-30-24-20-16-13-11-10-9-8-7-7-6-6-5-5-4-4-3-3 = 231 points total
I think it pans out quite well. For the most part, as you rise through the list, every place gained gets you about 20% more points.

You'll also have the option of unordered ballot, keeping the 231 points total. Each vote here will score 11 points - but you will have to select a number one, which will score 22. Two reasons for this: (a) no.1s are important; and (b) countback of no.1s will be one of the tiebreakers.

Only one David Sedaris book nommed?! (so far)

I don't know the bloke, but I looked him up when I was updating the list and he sounded like he would have interesting tales to tell.

I forgot to say that I'd created a new category for 'short stories', but I've only moved the obvious story collections in there and won't have time to go through the whole list to check if there are any others. If you spot anything in the wrong category, flag it up here and I'll change it.

Non-fiction has become quite a big category too, but (though I'd like to) I probably won't have the time to break it up any further.

Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions - 2008 (fiction - novel)

The book I've enjoyed most in the last several years.

emil.y, that's a good point. The graded scoring system should make it work pretty well too.

i only just noticed christopher logue was already on there. and percival everett! i was going to come on and agitate for someone to maybe nominate that.

i do think 'consider the lobster' (david foster wallace, 2005) should be on here though. oops.

I ain't bending the rules for that, thomp

i'll nominate consider the lobster (david foster wallace, 2005)

just saying. in case anyone else has a spare slot, is all.

xpost aha thanks!

heh

i only read 2 books this decade and now i've nominated both of them. they were both v good tho.

i never did get with youth actually. i wonder if anyone will nominate the other two of his this decade, slow man and summertime

Last updated list before nominations close. This is your last chance - today is the final day.

A slow day yesterday means we're now on 326 books. I know there's at least one set of nominations still to come. I had a go at sorting the non-fictions into categories. It works okay, but is necessarily rough - where do you put Dylan's Chronicles? - so no complaints please!

my non-fiction noms:

Rajiv Chandrasekaran - Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006)
Julian Barnes - Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008)
Mark Rowlands - The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons in Love, Death, and Happiness (2009)

(politics, autobiog, autobiog)

William Boyd - Any Human Heart (2002)

Good work Ismael in compiling the list.

I was surprised that there was only one Gladwell book on the list. i thought "Blink!" and "The Tipping Point" had been nominated. They are excellent books too.

Also, I was thinking that the defining theme of the noughties has been terrorism and the war on terror, starting with 9-11, Bali, 7-7, Mumbai etc. There are few books on the list which deal with this with the exception of "Netherland" and "Saturday" in an indirect way. Can those who have not nominated yet consider this in their nominations. I have John Updike's "Terrorist" on my shelves - unread - and assume he wrote that in response to 9-11 and the fall out from that and the war on terror. If someone else has read it and thinks it was excellent then they might want to nominate it.

I would be keen to have books high up on the final list which were not only published in the noughties but also reflect the main cultural, political and economic themes of those years. A really top class book, which I nominated I think, like Hollinghurst's "Line of Beauty", does not on reflection deal with issues we faced in the noughties; it instead deals with themes from the eighties. In some ways I feel it would be inappropriate for such a book to win the top prize for fiction for the noughties. Others may have different views of course...

Also, are there any good books dealing with the economic crisis and recession? I have one by Andy Zaltzman. I love his podcast "The Bugle" with Jon Oliver but wouldn't necessarily nominate his book on the credit crunch. But there must be others surely which have been published in the last year or two. This might reflect a weakness in our competition. Just as we commented at the outset, a lot of us were about to nominate books but then realised they'd been published in the 90s, and Ismael made the good point that some of those books were slow burners and they took a while to imprint themselves on the the public's consciousness. Similarly, there are almost certainly fantastic works which have recently been published on the economic crisis which we'll only become ware of in 2010 and beyond. It would be interesting to be able to compare the results we get from our exercise and the results we'd get if we repeated it 10 or 20 years down the line...

I'll cover a couple of these in my own nominations, but if it doesn't sound odd I think were still a bit close to get proper perspective on all that - I gather that the most direct attempts, like Terrorist or Falling Man, have been rather hamfisted. 'netherlands's very good but oblique. I think Saturday is a pretty great attempt actually. I haven't read The Reluctant Fundamentalist either.

As for financial crises, Liar's Poker is on my shelf, but again that deals with 80s - maybe it just takes time for things to sink in?

I was thinking that we don't have many crime bestsellers, actually - they are very popular.

Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (2000)
Malcolm Gladwell - Blink (2005)
Steven Levitt - Freakonomics (2005)
David Attenborough - Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (2002)
Anna Whitelock - Mary Tudor: England's First Queen (2009)
Steven Johnson - Everything Bad is Good for You (2005)

Stephanie Meyer - Twilight (2005)
Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Thank you caloma, that takes care of other couple that were on my list - now if someone else could see fit to nominate, say, four of the others before the deadline, that'd make my life a whole lot easier!

I'm going to leave nominations open until I get up tomorrow, just for you Hawaiians, then I'll post my own nominations and close the thread. So you've got about eight hours left.

Four others are, what, The Kite Runner, The Lovely Bones, The Shadow of the Wind and... uh, the South Beach Diet?

Julie Phillips - James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (2007)
Jean-Yves Tadie - Marcel Proust (translated 2000)

With supreme effort of will I stop there.

Ha, none of those - though I am surprised they haven't been snapped up yet (well, maybe not the South Beach Diet).

Oh what the hell, I'll whore myself out and ask for proxies for: Serious - John McEnroe; JFK: An Unfinished Life - Robert Dallek; Northern Shores - Alan Palmer; and Jonathan Lethem - The Disappointment Artist.

Gee, thanks guys. Here are my nominations anyway:

Politics:
Paul Berman - Terror and Liberalism (2003)
Nick Cohen - What's Left (2007)

History:
Ian Kershaw - Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 (2007)
Russel Shorto - The Island at the Centre of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan (2004)

Biography:
Jonathan Lethem - The Disappointment Artist (2005)

Fiction:
Cormac McCarthy - No Country for Old Men (2005)
John Updike - Rabbit Remembered (2000)
and
Dan Brown - The Da Vinci Code (2003)

Right, it's gone midnight in the Aleutians, which means that nominations are now closed. Voting thread to follow, and thanks for all your good work!

Gah. This always happens. I spent all yesterday coming up with a blank as to anything else to nominate, and then as soon as voting closes I come up with bloody Giorgio Agamben - State of Exception (2005), which would have come pretty high up on my ballot. On the other hand, I suspect I would have been the only person to vote for it, so it doesn't matter that much.

Ismael, Rabbit Remembered was nommed upthread by RedRayMaker, you can have one of your proxies I suppose.

Thanks Billy, but I let Red replace one of his with a diving book on the basis that I'd pick up the Rabbit one. There's so many favourites on the list that I probably wouldn't have been able to stretch to voting for my proxies anyway, so it's fine.

e.mily, it's taking so long to type the voting thread that I might be able to sneak yours onto the ballot post-facto (in return for two cartons of cigarettes and a book of food coupons)

Now take it to the ILX BOOK OF THE 00s: VOTING, lobbying and boostering thread