ILX BOOKS OF THE 00s: THE RESULTS! (or: Ismael compiles his reading list, 2010-2019)

I don't really want to waste my precious reading time reading a kid's book about wizards. So I have no idea if this is good for what it is or not. But it was bound to be on the list, and I don't particularly begrudge it being so, having been very much a 2000s cultural phenomenon.

I'm guessing Selby Jr's Waiting Period didn't get in then -- shame I was away while voting took place...

Agree that the film of the third one is perhaps the best of any of the books or films.

I think the books are more interesting for their retelling of the star wars story than for anything like their use of magic. Harry is a convenient fusion of the parts of luke and anakin skywalker with the most story potential.

Thought the film of Goblet of Fire was pretty weak, incidentally.

That reminds me, e.mily: I went to see Martin Amis give a reading in 2000. The Q&A afterwards was mostly pretentious students sucking up to him ("Do you see your role as to chronicle the pornography of the quotidian?") but someone did have the guts to ask him if he liked Harry Potter. I'm sure he was as disdainful as you'd expect, but I wish I could remember exactly what he said - I'm sure I'd never get tired of repeating it.

I don't think Selby Jr got nominated, but I was pretty amazed to find out that he (and Saul Bellow - maybe Burroughs as well?) were still alive and producing in the 2000s

Oh I think you copied and pasted the Selby from an ILB thread so I assumed it was nominated.

xxp to waitresses in nightclubs, presumably....

No, you're right, he was nominated, I just had him slightly out-of-place on my alphabetical list. You can draw your own conclusions from my uncertainty.

xp no no, that's all wrong - quoting Amis in those circumstances is something Amis would do

53. Netherland - Joseph O'Neill (2007)
(45 points, four votes)

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n49/n247540.jpg

Talk to me about 'Netherland'

Finished Joseph O'Neil's Netherland yesterday. I wanted to start a thread called "'We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically' Joseph O'Neil's Netherland" but was afraid no one cares/has the read the book/would post.
I loved it so much I'm reticent to give form or shape to my enthusiasm because I'm not sure I can describe the why w/o falling into hyperbole and/or incoherence. A big part of the pleasure in reading, for me, is stumbling on moments where an author makes explicable thoughts and feelings that I've had but have never been able to formulate and Netherland is filled w/those moments. When he's describing the formation of players on a cricket field, or applying for a driver's license or the drunken logic which dictates a boozy night out, O'Neill's prose is perfect. I just loved this novel so much.
― Lamp, Tuesday, May 27, 2008 11:57 PM (1 year ago)

OK, am now reading 'Netherland', and it's wonderful. Realised about 50 pages in that I read another book by this chap years and years ago--'The Breezes', which was a very funny novel about "the unluckiest family in Ireland".
― James Morrison, Monday, June 16, 2008 10:55 PM (1 year ago)

Iemand Joseph O'Neills Netherland gelezen? Is één van mijn favoriete boeken van het afgelopen jaar, zo niet het favoriete. (De grote favoriete van de 'kenners' ook trouwens: als het om boeken gaat ben ik een keiharde rockist.) Mooi geschreven boek over cricket, de draad in het leven een beetje kwijt zijn, post-9/11 New York (zonder dat het vermoeiend actueel probeert te zijn) en nog meer cricket. En een beetje cricket in Nederland ook.
― Martijn Grooten, Monday, December 8, 2008 10:56 AM (1 year ago)

Netherland, which is knocking it outta the park. I don't want to reach the last page.
― Jaq, Monday, August 25, 2008 2:58 PM (1 year ago)

Deserved better in my view. It just never got any momentum. Looking at my own ballot I see that I only gave it 13th spot, and I feel ashamed.

Ooh that looks v. good. Want to read it now. Nice to see some actually positive quotes beneath one of the placegetters!

I'm also ashamed that Lamp's thread title is so much better than mine.

Hm, maybe I've been going a bit overboard in trying to pick sceptical quotes, rather than gushing ones - but I've never read a bad word about Netherland. I think it even won some sort of 'cricket book of the year' prize here, which is usually reserved for things like Atherton's autobiography.

Netherland has a sluggish plot, ultimately unconvincing characters and a charmless, overly passive narrator, but is so astonishing on a sentence level that pretty much all is forgiven. It's remarkable that anyone's prose could be good enough to overcome flaws that in any other novel would make me throw it across the room. Some of the people I recommended it to, however, did just want to throw it across the room.

I'm a big cricket fan and, cricket literature definitely being a genre, have been meaning to give this a go for a while - this shd prompt me I reckon.

I didn't really get the Harry Potter phenomenon. I watched about three of the films but didn't find them very interesting. I suppose they are aimed at children though so that is probably not surprising. A good piece of business from Rowling though; well done her.

I thought this was an interesting read. However, I couldn't see what would propel it from "interesting" to "great". Can someone explain. I noted that the book got a lot of publicity following Obama's revelation i the summer that he was reading it.

The prose, the prose - literary critics go months waiting for sentences this beautifully crafted so they get understandably excited.

I agree with Lamp that the prose was excellent and there were some good insights. I just didn't think the story was all that strong. Nothing really happened in it of great consequence. Perhaps O'Neill was trying to evoke the atmosphere of a rained off fifth test dead rubber? It was like being in purgatory.

I thought everyone loved Netherland and it was a good shout for #1! I am evidently not one with the ILX zeitgeist.

never heard of it ;_; i love beautiful prose so it's shot to the top of my must-read list.

^^

(well i'm not crying but the rest of it)

During my research I found out that the author spent part of his own childhood in Holland (like the narrator). That's cleared something up for me at least, because (like I said in the link) when I read this I just couldn't believe how completely he'd taken on the guy's voice in all aspects of his life - I'm still in awe, but now what he's pulled off at least seems plausible.

haha that netherland post is one of my firsts posts on ilx b4 i posted regularly. its written in the afterglow for sure - his writing is so good and so assured u dont really notice much else at first~

to say that nothing happens is kinda missing the point tho - its not lol harry potter - its a novel abt the anxiety of shifting perspectives. i thought that the narrator and the cricket dude where really well-drawn and well-revealed but buying into their relationship and how it moves the narrator is the core of the book. i guess if u dont sympathize with or register that change than its a p empty book

its hard to be concise here but while i think the book does fail in its larger thematic concerns but i thought it was jamesian in its softly-glowing illumination of one man's journey~~~

but i mean take all this w/ a grain of salt since i had "netherland" ranked lower than a book where a bunch of veteran soldiers magically transform into a giant tiger \o_0/

One theme that only came through the second time I read it - the first half is full of different people being brought together, like Hans joining the West Indians in their cricket club, the crazy schemes for finding hidden ethnic restaurants, all the lost souls at the hotel. In the second half that's gone - it's all dinner parties with banking colleagues, unwelcoming Russian bathhouses, and the hotel's residents being repatriated. There's barely a black person left in the book, only Chuck, still trying to make connections and pursue his dream that no-one wants any more.

52. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson (2004)
(45 points, two votes, one first-placed vote)

http://ndn2.newsweek.com/media/97/robinson-marilynne-author-home-BK01-wide-horizontal.jpg

I finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson a few weeks ago. It was rich, complex, wonderful.
― Jaq (Jaq), Tuesday, April 12, 2005 3:18 AM (4 years ago)

Marilyn Robinson's "Gilead" is just really slaying me at the moment. i have to keep putting it down because the writing is so beautiful.
― jed_ (jed), Saturday, July 2, 2005 9:34 PM (4 years ago)

Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" which is beautiful and precise and wonderful and complex and still. I'm reading it very slowly and, for the first time in a long time, i'm in no particular rush to reach the end. i LOVE this book. please read it.
― jed_ (jed), Sunday, July 10, 2005 10:59 PM (4 years ago)

i'm nearly finished Housekeeping. i... kinda like it but, for me, it's nowhere near the book "Gilead" is. that's a huge towering masterpiece. even while i was reading it i knew it was going to be a top ten book for me and, indeed, it is.
― jed_ (jed), Tuesday, August 16, 2005 11:58 PM (4 years ago)

over and over again i found i had to stop reading "Gilead" because i was crying AT THE BEAUTY OF IT and that is not a word of a lie. please read it.
― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, August 17, 2005 12:01 AM (4 years ago)

i cried throughout large sections of Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" this year. In recent years almost no other book has made me cry so it took me by surprise somewhat.
― jed_ (jed), Friday, October 7, 2005 10:52 PM (4 years ago)

i recommend Gilead to anyone (ahem) though i won't be lending it out in case i don't get it back. my favourite book of this year by some distance.
― jed_ (jed), Saturday, December 24, 2005 9:34 PM (4 years ago)

Wld love for jed_ to be Marilynne Robinson online alias & just a really arrogantly huge fan of her own work.

Housekeeping is one of those books I consider a magnificent artistic achievement, but on some level don't really LIKE. Like Mrs. Dalloway. Beautiful and somehow inhuman. But I should read Gilead.

a book where a bunch of veteran soldiers magically transform into a giant tiger

what the what

that description, while vaguely true, oversells the book 1000%

a book where a bunch of veteran soldiers magically transform into a giant tiger

This bit in The Corrections always surprises me.

maybe if peter fucking jackson directed it

a book where a bunch of veteran soldiers magically transform into a giant tiger

knew I should have read the Sinai diving guide all the way to the end

u guyz clearly i was talking abt cãrtãrescu's nostalgia ~ which btw placed waaaaaay too low itt.

Gilead's such a beautiful book -- the cursed thing even made me want to start going to church, savage atheist that I am. Can't say it made me cry, but I'll admit to some manful flexing of the lacrimal apparatus. Liked it a whole lot more than Housekeeping, great though as that book is.

That was only the 2005 quotes from jed_, by the way - s/he was still going eighteen months later before I stopped looking

I've been following along - excellent job Ismael, this has been great for my Amazon wishlist!!

Gilead is really beautiful, and Oystein OTM about wanting to start going to church. Haven't been since I was small and Gilead actually made me *miss* church.

Also re that Wells Tower book way upthread -- he read one of the stories on This American Life, that's how I first heard of it. May be why it struck some as being familiar?

Europeana killing me btw. Thanks this thread.

A bonus one tonight, then that's it because I'm practically falling asleep. Top fifty starts tomorrow.

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris (2000)
(46 points, five votes)

http://files.performingarts.ucla.edu/0607images/davidsedaris/Sedaris%20Hi%20Res%20Color%20(photo%20by%20Robert%20Banks).jpg

DAVID SEDARIS = genius
David Sedaris, Douglas Rackoff & Sarah Vowell

I remember reading "Me Talk Pretty One Day" between planes in an airport once, and practically weeping I was laughing so hard. Granted, i was exhausted, but still.
― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Monday, January 19, 2004 10:55 PM (6 years ago)

I was rather disturbed by the stuff in 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' about how Sedaris went to Paris and did nothing but watch American movies there and mock the illogicality of the gender system in the French language. Then there were the put- downs of faggoty New York restaurants with their 'over-creative food', and the jokes about pretentious art students doing drugs.

Sedaris, like any writer, writes about what he knows. But he's a satirist, so he attacks what he knows. When this is persecution, like the 'speech therapy' he underwent at school, that's fine. But when, later, he has approximately the kind of life he deserves -- a gay, sophisticated, metropolitan one -- he attacks that too. That's when it gets problematical for me. Paris and New York are too sophisticated, and the suburbs are too boring and straight. Breeders from the boondocks get mocked when they visit him in New York, but queeny head waiters get mocked too.
So where does Sedaris stand? What are his unquestionable values, his unimpeachable virtues? They seem to be 'me and my sister, and our difference from everybody else'. And I'm a teensy bit concerned by some sort of autism there.
― Momus, Wednesday, May 29, 2002 12:00 AM (7 years ago)

I remember laughing out loud at these:
...
8. David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day (*)
...
*: I pissed my pants laughing while reading these.
― Vermont Girl (Vermont Girl), Thursday, February 19, 2004 2:34 PM (5 years ago)

He never advanced from, or ever even equalled, the incredible promise of _Barrel Fever_.

I don't know the guy, but I'd guess that Alex and Vermont Girl were reading him in the right spirit, and Momus was not.

That's a big ass image up there.

So it is. I'd been trying to keep it to small pics, and even went so far as to reduce some of the ones upthread, but life is just a bit too short to make that the rule. I did think there was some kind of size limiter on the board though.

50. The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial Of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories - Nicholas Gurewitch (2008)
(46 points, six votes)

http://popculturezoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/pbf165-yarteries.jpg
http://jdsmanstories.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/PBF146-Bumble_Buzzin.jpg
http://jdsmanstories.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/PBF210-Wishing_Well.gif

The Perry Bible Fellowship has a new home in G2

I'm a huge fan of "smart people humor", and PBF has never let me down. It was torture having to wait the long months until I received this book for a Christmas present - I was instructed not to buy it from the gift giver.
Two thumbs up, Mr. Gurewitch. Two thumbs up. Hurry up with a sequel already!
― and what, Monday, January 7, 2008 3:18 PM (2 years ago)

* Perry Bible Fellowship / Nicholas Gurewitch - fucking great, of course. I'm inspired that this comic could become a success.
― Nhex, Tuesday, April 15, 2008 6:39 PM (1 year ago)

haha, i didn't get my votes in on time for this poll, unfortunately, but i would have voted Gilead number 1. i'm interested to know who did vote it top. i've probably never been caught online being so effusive so i'm happy about that, thanks Ismael ;)