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)

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