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

That's pretty funny.

ok that that did better than ben marcus is a fucking travesty and all of you who voted for it are fucking tasteless (redacted)

Marcus has been a long-time mean-to-read. Will def get the impetus from this

Do this! But make it The Age of Wire and String, I think.

read both!

just make sure you don't read vernon god little

I must confess I do prefer The Age of Wire and String, but possibly because they are both so tied to the same way of looking at/distorting/creating the world, and that was the one I read first. Would definitely concur with 'read both'.

notable american women was v much not my thing but i liked age of wire and string a bit or at least found it readable

lol @ vernon god little h8 tho ive read and completely forgot it ~ think he had a weird way of writing 'paradigm'?

I will not miss this one -- I will dodge it like the plague.

it would've looked good on your alternative list, I reckon

the age of wire and string is cool pick up and read a page or paragraph randomly, which I'm happy with

I don't know why but thinking about the age of wire and string is making me think about that motorman book by David Ohle, which is super readable

been meaning to read that for ages. and the age of sinatra. i like reading wire and string in sections

i think my distaste for vernon god little is tied to reading it at much the same age as the protagonist, and finding it a basically intensely patronising and non-charitable attempt to get inside the head of someone of that age, even allowing that, age 15 or whatever, i wasn't much like the guy. it felt like your grumpy uncle's lame cartoon stereotype idea of the thought processes of a misfit teen. or, worse, like a cartoon stereotype grumpy uncle's c.s. idea of the t.p. of an m.t.

i didn't finish a sentence: i like wire and string in sections but i've never been able to make them hang together in my mind; don't know if this is me or the book

lamp yr other diss of notable american women was funnier

the contrast between subject and style might have a lot to do with that.

Haven't read the book but I hated the Damned United movie. maybe because they got rid of the style? or maybe because i don't care about sports.

I can't fathom why Nasim Taleb raises so much ire above, given that his central point

Sorry I didn't get back to this sooner. I don't have a problem with Taleb's point, more the manner (and personal direction) that he comes from coloring his delivery of it so much. It is extremely common knowledge that the assumptions underlying the models are flawed, but the products need to be priced in some way and this is the best available. The shooting fish in a barrel part is easy, the actual adding something valuable to the discussion, like - perchance - a better alternative, might help.

Plus one central point does not one full book make, and certainly not two. Most probably I spend too much time involved in the academic side of such issues that I am in the minority to find that Taleb's intelligensia philosophy on the topic drives me insane.

It is extremely common knowledge that the assumptions underlying the models are flawed, but the products need to be priced in some way and this is the best available

I don't think Taleb would disagree with that. The problem is when bank managers start to put too much faith in the so-called science of risk management rather than in rules of thumb, experience, curiosity, skepticism and innate risk aversion. He simplifies the mathematics to reach a general audience, but the people who were making the key decisions at these banks were not mathematicians either, and maybe it would have helped if they had read something a little bit scary presented in layman's terms.

it would've looked good on your alternative list, I reckon

That and Twilight, as Raymaker said. There's another one I'll dodge.

VGL never made much of a noise over here though, unlike some Booker winners.

Taleb and Wire and String discussions: this thread is finding its strength

I was once at a party with Ben Marcus, and I was kind of drunk, and came up to him and tried to explain how I thought he was the only contemporary fiction writer who could be said to be making a new genre, and he seemed really uncomfortable and not into my extravagant and somewhat diffuse praise.

So if you ever meet him, don't, you know, do that.

By the way guys, if you like Ben Marcus you should REALLY read Bern Porter's I've Left: A Manifesto and Testament of SCIence and ART. It's part satire, part honest explication of his Sciart project (which I wrote my MA thesis on), and it contains some images and ideas that you can trace down to Ben Marcus (houses made out of wind and water, new clothing devices, words made out of chemicals). I'm pretty sure Marcus is directly influenced by Porter, as the latter left Brown University a fair portion of his archive. (I would actually like to write on this some more as a proper article, to be honest, as I am both a Porter and Marcus stan.)

those dudes are pretty rad but i dont like any of them as much as that stephen millhauser short story about the history of cinema and i dont really like any of them all that much~~~ really like stories i guess really like ppl for sure

lamp yr other diss of notable american women was funnier

i dont remember this? fwiw think hes a smart dude i just... i cant love it its like homework except i generally like homework

I read Vernon God Little, I seem to remember enjoying it...I really should keep a journal of what I read, my memory is failing me so bad now it's embarrassing

YAY = Anathem! Halfway through it at the moment...I find I can read it at a more leisurely pace because if I try to gobble too much at once it makes my brain hurt. But the feeling I get when reading it reminds me of first reading 'Cryptonomicon'...I just really love the way Stephenson can make a story so, um, simultaneously multileveled? (Though the Baroque Cycle broke me & remains unfinished)

I think The Baroque Cycle broke Stephenson and remains unfinished. At least that's what I felt when I reached the end.

i thought vernon god little was funny too ¯\(°_0)/¯

I don't know why but thinking about the age of wire and string is making me think about that motorman book by David Ohle, which is super readable

Which in turn is making me think about the album by Venus Bogardus

The problem is when bank managers start to put too much faith in the so-called science of risk management rather than in rules of thumb, experience, curiosity, skepticism and innate risk aversion.

The real problem starts with the fact that risk management gets marginalized in the institution to begin with, simply because the market is going strong. The risk limits widen (either perceptively, by being volatility coefficient based and a positive economy being low vol and providing poor historics for some evaluation practices), but the perceived opportunity cost rises - see Chuck Prince's famed As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance... we're still dancing".
I would certainly agree that the management teams should have been more aware - to reach an executive level in finance you would think there would be an innate fascination with securitized products, CDOs, CDO^2 and the various other vehicles that were providing rapidly increasing profits. I wouldn't say sub-prime was a black swan though; Florida and Cali looked set to fall, were heavily dominant in structures and I have always been a proponent of the crisis correlation being equal to one. I don't really feel that the risk figures are the cause in giving management comfort- more that the they are widely ignored when the going is good, replaced by some idealistic thought process that raises the unbelievable conjecture that risk can be reduced rather than conserved, that reward can be made without risk and that the whole concept of banking has been turned on its head by the emperor's new clothes. Really there ought to be some tiered system on the nature and concept of risk figures reported at different levels – a VaR on a CDS portfolio means a lot to its portfolio manager, but the expected loss can mislead the magnitude to management where a different metric ought to be used.

The direction and nature that risk assessment should take now is tricky. I would expect that Toyota had a six sigma process on their braking and acceleration systems, but by the same way as financial firms found that the use of distributions can be problematic when the coverage is not complete and the application is too literal. Creating integrated risk models is a terrifying task – it would be akin, if not more developed, that a central bank risk model, with correlations (weak point), cointegration (weak point), distribution functions (weak point) and so many others it would be one large string vest as opposed to many focused, somewhat finer ones. Trying to solve this is currently something I have the unenviable task of looking at.

Taleb also pushed his chance of popularity out with the idea that successful traders were lucky, likely derived from the fact that he wasn't successful, ergo it couldn't be based on skill. The fact remained that he was skillful but his strategy was a sleeper strategy, plus he had an insatiable appetite to talk about it resulting in it becoming expensive. The whole using risk models as opposed to 2500 years of learned skills and understanding is a misleading thought – all the banks have very similar risk models, yet some banks ended much deeper in trouble, some funds flourished as others were completely wiped out. The learned history is critical, the question has to be raised as to whether the organization has (the correct) someone in the seat with the ability to comprehend and react to what they are seeing when a systematic contagion is about to hit a typically idiosyncratic market.

Maybe it is because Taleb writes philosophy on a topic I feel he is capable and could significantly contribute to in a practitioner's sense. Perhaps it is that he spotted a topic that many were writing about and sensed the opportunity to amalgamate much of the work, remove the math but add some celebration of theoretical thought, and become a Bono to the ending of Gaussian distribution derived distress and hurt. But my version would cost about $80 on Wiley and be read by a tiny factor of the people that read NNT's two books.

The only person I can think to compare him to for his insatiable desire for publicity would be Nouriel Roubini. With his book coming on Penguin Press I sort of expect the worst, though his academic classes are pretty good.
Sorry, slightly off topic and a bit of a thought-dump which could be better supported- sadly time is not on my side to write more at the moment (plus the wish to not always think about mathematical distributions).

post more, post longer imo.

Nice post. I wish I knew what it meant. It does help to explain why Malcolm Gladwell is so popular though.

35. The Rest Is Noise - Alex Ross (2008)
(61 points, six votes)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41qZ5MzZiVL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise

woofwoofwoof:
Books can be educational! This taught me things. If I knew a little
more about modern classical I'd probably have been shouting at it, but
since I don't I was quite happy to find out things and be pointed
towards new music. Thanks for Ligeti, Alex.

OMG the best book on music -- any kind of music -- I've read in years. it's probably works best for people like me who aren't familiar w/the classical tradition but wow! ross describes highly technical music in terms a layperson can fully grasp w/o patronizing and seamlessly connects music to then current events, explicating things I've always half-understood like the connection between Wagner and fascism. right now I'm slowly working my way through the recommended listening at the end, and so far enjoying what I'm hearing and understanding it too -- the highest recommendation for a book like this.
right now I can't think of a pop music book that ever affected me like this. and I'm not one for hyperbole.
― m coleman, Monday, January 28, 2008 10:56 AM (2 years ago)

I've got to read this.

been sitting on my bookshelf for about a year and a half now. he's a great critic and he's really good about giving props to those people and places that are trying to take classical music out of the symphony halls and make it a little more audience friendly.

Great book, though I say that as someone who knows so little about classical music that I couldn't begin to take issue with it. I'd be interested to see a critical reading of it by an expert. I saw Ross do a presentation about blogging and he is, unfortunately, the worst public speaker I have ever seen - stiff, bumbling and charismaless. I forget that some writers only come alive on the page.

I kind of feel that that's how writers should be. I've always been a bit suspicious of the idea of Hemingway or Capote alpha types - the anonymous guy soaking things up in the background seems more writerly to me.

34. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz (2007)
(63 points, four votes)

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/2161/junotdiaz.jpg

Alex in Montreal:
A book where the footnotes are almost as wonderfully funny and insightful as the main text. This is a good thing.

Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

I'm still wondering if I'm going to finish Oscar Wao. I did finally get back into The Rest is Noise though. I think I'm finding it gradually more interesting as it goes because I never really cared that much about Wagner or Strauss.
― Hurting 2, Friday, January 25, 2008 7:19 PM (2 years ago)

In the book that Oscar Wao character goes to my high school (Don Bosco Tech) and university (Rutgers) at the same time I was there! I wonder if I've ever met the author, Junot Diaz. He must've known some guys from my high school or something.
He was at RU when I and folks from my hs were there so...possible...
How's the book, btw?
― Capitaine Jay Vee, Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:52 AM (2 years ago)

I like it so far - about 1/3 of the way through. It's very heavy on "voice" narration which I don't always like, and there are a few too many seemingly-unnecessary allusions, especially to comic books.
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:58 AM (2 years ago)

I gave it to my sis for Xmas since she wanted to read it. Now I expect her to come to me with the comic book questions as I am fairly expert in such nerdery.
― Capitaine Jay Vee, Wednesday, January 16, 2008 5:03 AM (2 years ago)

haha, I think the narrator also uses the word "nerdery"
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, January 16, 2008 5:08 AM (2 years ago)

started reading part ii of rest is noise yesterday -- seems like he focuses on opera too much, perhaps because it's easy to write about the connections between the music and the story. also, i downloaded salome which he mentions throughout part i and it did nothing for me.

Taleb also pushed his chance of popularity out with the idea that successful traders were lucky, likely derived from the fact that he wasn't successful, ergo it couldn't be based on skill.

It might have been self-serving, but I don't doubt there's a pretty fair chunk of luck involved in most "hot streak" type trading successes. He's pretty good on explaining how a certain period of outperformance is not incompatible with the operation of blind chance. I also enjoyed his slam on the silly newspaper headlines that seek to explain every 1-2% move in the Dow or S&P 500 as somehow reflecting the major business news story of the day. No doubt Taleb is not as smart as he thinks he is, but I daresay there may not be anyone as smart as Taleb thinks he is.

Oscar Wao never attracted me at all, not really sure why - his other book Drown was one of the best things I've ever read

The whole using risk models as opposed to 2500 years of learned skills and understanding is a misleading thought – all the banks have very similar risk models, yet some banks ended much deeper in trouble, some funds flourished as others were completely wiped out.

This is a good point too. They all had similar models, but only a few of them had the foresight to trim the sails enough to avoid shipwreck when the storm hit. I think it had something to do with a deeper understanding of the assumptions built into the models as well as the limitations of the models, and a willingness to trust gut instincts even when they couldn't be backed up by a sophisticated mathematical model.

I picked up Wao a couple of weeks ago after reading some blog repping for it as best novel of the 00s. Couldn't get past the first 30 pages - it was like reading some ILx nerd. Presumably it gets better?

it's exciting getting down to the business end of this poll now. i'm looking forward to the top 30; many of my nominations are still to come so im looking forward to seeing how highly they place!

i really liked Drown too but i had the same reaction to Oscar Wao as Stevie, it seemed like it was by a different writer! too try-hard or something.

drown is a lot better than oscar but if u cant get w/ nerd shit than u probably arent gonna like the latter much at all

33. The Russian Debutante's Handbook - Gary Shteyngart (2003)
(64 points, three votes, one first-placed vote)

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/8912/10garyshteyngart0908lg9.jpg

mizzell:
The best book ever written about Prava, the Paris of the 90s.

I'm currently reading The Russian Debutante's Handbook the frequently funny, picaresque debut novel by Gary Shteyngart. I discovered Shteyngart through a short story and an article about T.a.T.u. in the New Yorker.
― o. nate (onate), Wednesday, June 4, 2003 2:37 PM (6 years ago)

seems to just go on forever. I don't think I like it. Has anyone else read it? I think it's supposed to be a lighter read than I'm actually finding it to be, although it could be my humour.
― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Saturday, January 6, 2007 9:39 AM (3 years ago)

I'm reading The Russian's Debutante's Handbook, which I had avoided because of its terrible cover, and it's really really funny. Like one of the funniest books I've read in a while.
― n/a, Wednesday, September 12, 2007 6:23 PM (2 years ago)

Last week I met the author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook (I don't think I've met a novelist before). He was interesting because it was like he was on all the time, every sentence was some kind of hilarious anecdote. I didn't think art reflected life that closely.
― Maria (Maria), Tuesday, March 1, 2005 1:57 AM (4 years ago)

Ironically, I read Wao straight after belatedly getting round to Fortress of Solitude, which I loved (well, the first 3/4s of it anyway), so I dunno if it's strictly the nerdy shit I couldn't get with. I just found the narrative voice irritating and even unconvincing...

Have never even *heard* of the Russian Deb Handbook!

Me neither. Obviously one person is nuts about it though.

Obviously I can't go anywhere near it now after seeing that photo, but it crops up in the archives as part of an Eastern European fad in the first half of the decade. I wasn't really aware of that either, other than Everything Is Illuminated. Maybe it was an American thing.

His other book, Absurdistan, is better-known I think - I'm pretty sure I've read about it before, though I may be mixing it up with various books called things like Londonstan

That's quite a photo. Really gunning hard for the creepy arsehole look.

can't wait to post about how much i hated Everything Is Illuminated when that places

32. Austerlitz - WG Sebald (2001)
(65 points, five votes)

http://i46.tinypic.com/2e3nxqb.jpg

wmlynch:
Like Sebald's other books Austerlitz is a meditation on time and memory. Sebald has an uncanny ability to evoke the fragility of human experience and human relationships and to describe the effects of society's dissolution and disintegration even while often addressing these topics obliquely. Austerlitz and the narrator are melancholic characters and the story is filled with sorrow, but the prose is stunning (as usual) and the book is nearly impossible to put down.

W. G. Sebald - C or D?

I thought Austerlitz was quite moving and powerful and unlike any other writer I can think of. He has a very poetic way of describing mental states and processes - reminds us that the mind can be a mysterious landscape all on its own. But so far, Vertigo seems like an early attempt at the same effect - where he hadn't quite polished his style to perfection. Many of the same stylistic tics are present, but where in Austerlitz they seem to flow naturally, in Vertigo they seem to stick out - almost like a cookie dough which hasn't been mixed thoroughly enough and still has clumps of baking soda in it. Also, in Vertigo, the geographic names and Italian quotations come fast and thick - a map and maybe footnotes with translations would be quite helpful.
― o. nate (onate), Wednesday, January 12, 2005 8:26 PM (5 years ago)

Not the recognised authority on the Nazi's organisational skills, but GOD. The counting of heads, the systematic killing, fuck.
― Andrew Thames (Andrew Thames), Tuesday, November 18, 2003 12:15 PM (6 years ago)

a bit joyless but interesting all the same, the thing is I dont think i could actually tell you what it was "about" which is refreshing in a way. Its a really puzzling book, you have absolutely no sense of where its going and after finishing it I had little sense of what it was. None of the meaning is made expicit. Even in translation it seemed Perfectly written though and the flow of it is incredible, it seems structureless, hypnotic.
― jed (jed_e_3), Saturday, December 6, 2003 12:27 AM (6 years ago)

I wish I could copy and paste the section from W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz where the narrator visits the archives of a Nazi concentration camp and watches a 14 minute reel of footage of the prisoners playing music that has been slowed down to last an hour. The description of the distortions of the sound is quite poetic.
...
Here's a brief snippet that I transcribed from Amazon:
"In a brief sequence at the very beginning, showing red-hot iron being worked in a smithy to shoe a draft ox, the merry polka by some Austrian operetta composer on the sound track of the Berlin copy had become a funeral march dragging along at a grotesquely sluggish pace, and the rest of the musical pieces accompanying the film, among which I could identify only the can-can from La Vie Parisienne and the scherzo from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, also moved in a kind of subterranean world, through the most nightmarish depths, said Austerlitz, to which no human voice has ever descended."
― o. nate (onate), Friday, July 30, 2004 3:08 PM (5 years ago)