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

Lord knows you can be tiresomely sentimental about stuff you know a lot about, is what I'm trying to say.

It only takes 90 minutes to read, is about the best I can say for it.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 11 February 2010 15:59 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Really? Cool, see you in 2 hours.

I think I was a bit too hard on Homeland in my quote listed above. It seems better in my memory now.

haha i had veronica @ #14 on my list but its strange to me that that would be someone's favorite book. its much more a book i admire than a book i love.

i remember liking the curious incident okay. i think it is p sentimental but im not sure being sharper or more clear-eyed about autism or his characters would have made it a better or more praiseworthy book.

i thought he meant dogville was his favourite film. maybe i lack reading skills ;_;

oh mb idk.

i do think we might have gotten more discussion if ppl had read each others selections - this list has been p useful for things to check out but we havent really argued too much. probably just want call ppl names tho

Lamp, btw, i bought that Andre Aciman book you recommended to me like 6 months ago on ILB. will let you know how i get on with it.

i do think we might have gotten more discussion if ppl had read each others selections

I mean, look, we might have gotten more discussion if people read books in general! Just look at the number of votes; max 1/10 as many people voted in this as, say, the 80s album poll. So of course less discussion. Lots of people have heard and can argue about 1000 records released in a decade; but there are very few people, certainly not me, who have strong opinions about 1000 or even 500 books published this decade, right?

Lots of people have heard and can argue about 1000 records released in a decade

Not quite! xp We got somewhere near half as many votes as the albums poll. It's probably more that to have a proper fight we'd need proper haterz - and mostly you don't bother reading books you hate or you give up pretty quickly, whereas with music there's plenty of stuff you can hate but can't really avoid.

It might change a bit when we get into the top twenty and things get a bit less niche - otherwise we'll all just have to step up with the invective. If only Amis had placed higher...

in the context that ilx is an extension of ilm i guess sure. (ha xpost) i know a bunch of ppl that havent heard near that many records or watched nearly that many movies. and it wasnt meant as a criticism really, just an observation (albiet a p obv one)

also i *think* about 30 ppl voted in this do 300 ppl really vote in ilm polls?

mostly you don't bother reading books you hate or you give up pretty quickly, whereas with music there's plenty of stuff you can hate but can't really avoid.

yeah, and also i don't have 3-5 minutes excerpts from the major books of the moment read to me at work throughout the day.

nothing really comparable to reading a book.

latest album poll = 100 ballots. (x-post)

(xposts)

Yeah, book-fite clusterfucks don't kick off often from what I see. I guess entry bar quite high for joining in (books aren't instantly available & take time to read); area too broad; so not much shared ground = smallish groups who can see that they don't have anything in common & are mutually polite - see the well-mannered discussions of 'why do you like these 'fantasy' novels?' upthread.

Needs compulsive poster with intransigent opinions.

Needs Dr Morbius to read more

fantasy books rule and all other fiction sucks ass

(but now i'm just repeating myself from the discussion above)

We had 39 ballots, Tuomas got about 80, and musically a little more than that. There's also the fact that you just can't consume as many books as you can songs or albums*, and a lot of people couldn't stretch to twenty books, whereas it's relatively easy to fill a ballot with thirty or forty albums or whatever. So our results are necessarily fairly shallow and niche, but it's made for an interesting list I reckon.

We'll see how it holds up now we're approaching the top, where I think consensus starts to play more of a role. Plenty to hate there.

* thomp excepted

(xposts)

Maybe a Geir, with 19th-Century novel in place of orchestral pop.

Oh yeah, I like the way the list looks. It's way more interesting & idiosyncratic than a broadsheety decade list - sort of reflect what's good about the what are you reading threads.

I'd like to see BookGeir confronted with a pile of pomo fiction. Sparks would start coming out of his ears and his head would spin round.

smallish groups who can see that they don't have anything in common & are mutually polite

haha yah i feel like this abt all the non-fiction/music stuff on this list. and with the exception of a couple of things (house of leaves & saturday) i can reasonably see why ppl might have liked the things i have read so is just like "yeah, not for me but i think i get what ppl value abt this"

the one thing abt disagreement is that it forces u to think about why u liked something and also (for me) gives permission to talk about it. like i could write a p lengthy defense of alice munro but it feels sorta hubristic and weird to do so in a vacuum or when ppl are like "yeah, shes p good".

It's a good point, there's basically no record or film so canonical that it doesn't have a healthy population of haters. But are there actually a lot of people who would make a point of hating Alice Munro? Maybe super-experimental language types who think conventional narrative prose is a dead end and has been for decades?

Must confess I'd never actually heard of her before all this. But I'm pretty sure she's crap.

yeah. she fucking sucks

that's the spirit!

50 odd pages in and I don't get the sentimental thing. Reasonably enjoyable though and after I eat, will crack on.

house of leaves & saturday

Same sort-of exceptions for me, or I think people are valuing the wrong thing. There's a few reasons I wouldn't really let myself have a go at them - sort of glad that ppl get enthused about fiction; don't really remember them very well; felt that attacking HoL in particular, since imo it egregiously flatters its readers & is cult-bait, would seem insulting; think there are good things about these books (fairly standard on HoL - enjoyed the scary house story); etc

Let's put some effort into the Munro-hate people:

Munro just biting played-out Chekhov steez + bullsh*t hard-life 'authenticity'. Plus pc ballot padding - if she was a man, you wouldn't vote for her.

(never actually read her. I think I'd like her, have been meaning to for a while now)

I'll be reading the worthless old fraud soon myself, even though she only got where she is because of her famous novelist father.

"felt that attacking HoL in particular, since imo it egregiously flatters its readers & is cult-bait, would seem insulting"

please elaborate!!

i knew someone who did his undergrad dissertation on it. not as bad as the girl i knew who did her MA dissertation on jeff smith's bone though.

Flattery/cult-bait specifics have to wait till I get home tonight but the 'insulting' thing is partly because people tend to be personally invested in cult books, & the cult behind HoL is strong, from what I can see on the web (& knowing one big fan); and the claim that the book's hoodwinking its readers is obvs p aggressive.

I knew a guy who wrote his dissertation on Infinite Jest and is now a mega-famous sitcom writer.

With music, if somebody recommends something I'll usually go and check it out, even if it's to turn it off in ten seconds never to listen to it again. Feel the need to sink into books a bit more, so, perversely, tend to come to snap judgements (Monro good, very bad example) using more or less trivial data (covers, other people's opinions, feeling of intense suspicion) as a sort of filter to reduce the amount of stuff I want to read.

Often come round to things through other routes anyway (my undergrad anti-tastes make me shudder now - narrow-minded tit) and have tried to sometimes go for stuff that every cell in my body is shying away from, but generally I'm quite easily led by my nose to stuff I want to read, and away stuff I don't - no sense of duty to the book dammit.

Basically all this means I can go with the intransigent opinions, but I haven't got a shred of experience to back them up (unless the expertise has been provided by alcohol), thus wd quickly be revealed exposed. This is no good for extended trolling.

Need someone who can bring in a mass of irrelevant detail to support their argument about everything everybody has read.

Am determined however to go for a few things on this, inc Monro - and will come back with the intransigence at a later date maybe. Assuming I haven't been won over to your lol women writers.

23. A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers (2000)
(76 points, seven votes)

http://postsurf.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/chang_deggers_port1.jpg

Dave Eggers Throwdown
Does anybody - really - like Dave Eggers' novel?
Can anyone explain the appeal of Dave Eggers to me!?
Dave Eggers: I owe my literary education to Sting
Dave Eggers is signing copies of his book in the bookstore directly beneath my apartment, right now, even as we speak: C or D?
Nick Hornby adapts _Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ for film = NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I even think the singing track sort of works, in a complex Postmodern way come on then! explain...
In much the same way as Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, for me. The blend of self-referentiality, irony and unmistakeably genuine emotion is a pretty rich one, I think, and his attempts at proper feeling in a singing voice is part of this. Obviously he's a rotten singer, but he avoids playing on that as a joke. I expect the song would be pretty intolerable without the rapping bits (I'm one of those who think he's a genuinely great rapper). I should add, not for the first time, that if you think I'm reading layers of irony and subtleties into it that Eminem doesn't intend, I don't care cos they're there in the music, whether he meant to put them there or not. Read the lyrics: at the same time as he's describing the way he acts versus the internal reality, he is contradicting it by the act of saying it! There's been no pop star since Madonna's heyday to so repay thought and analysis.
― Martin Skidmore, Wednesday, May 29, 2002 12:00 AM (7 years ago)

ja krijg dat maar eens in een keer uit je strot.. nu goed: a heartbreaking work of staggering genius..
― jasper (oblomov), Thursday, January 30, 2003 4:42 PM (7 years ago)

Ai, ik bedenk me nu dat die al sinds mijn verjaardag (vorige zomer) heb liggen om te lezen. En nu mijn computer weer bijna is gemaakt heb ik ook geen goed excuus meer om een boek te lezen...
― Martijn Grooten (martijng), Thursday, January 30, 2003 9:28 PM (7 years ago)

It's this guy who's parents died within two weeks of each other - hilarity ensues. Really.
― phil-two (phil-two), Monday, March 24, 2003 2:31 PM (6 years ago)

Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius makes me want to kill the man and I've only read exerpts!
― Ally (mlescaut), Tuesday, May 13, 2003 8:12 PM (6 years ago)

Same here, but I've only read the title!
― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, May 13, 2003 10:55 PM (6 years ago)

seriously ffs

Until a few minutes ago my life was an Eggers-free zone. I'll be getting it back there just as soon as I can. To give him his due he does inspire a fine thread title - and that photo, you have to take your hat off at some level.

i am anti-eggers in general but that was a good first book imo

i have never read the guy but im turned off by the turbo-douchey title

"felt that attacking HoL in particular, since imo it egregiously flatters its readers & is cult-bait, would seem insulting"

please elaborate!!

So I'd be thinking mostly of the references and stuff to decode in it - feels like a really cerebral dry exercise, & like it's patting you on the back for solving its acrostics, mulling over the coloured words, wondering who wrote what etc - it just feels closer to Masquerade than anything I could care about.

If I prod myself on it a bit, & wonder why Nabokov is a-ok doing the same stuff (the acrostic in The Vane Sisters, a who's-writing=this puzzle in Pale Fire), or why Gray's metafiction & typography stuff in 1982, Janine is so great then I get a little stuck, but can try: HoL doesn't feel interested in the world & leans towards screechy gothic melodrama; the puzzle elements just feel like cleverness exercises (no emotive force); it's too long + the best part (scary house!) comes away cleanly from the Johnny Rebel & meta crap, so it doesn't feel like there's any formal rigour. And I do feel like he just thought at some point 'hey what if wrote a book in Quark instead of Word?'.

I've got no prob with people saying it's a fun read - it is, more or less; but I've dealt with people arguing for it as super-important, or the best, and that feels daft. tbf the tradition of experiment with the physical form of a book isn't that interesting to me and meta-fictional games I mostly find dull, so I'm not an ideal reader; but it is one book where I look at its rabid fans & think 'Really? That's what you want?'

Oh important disclaimer - I read it when it came out and not since, so I'm not fresh on it.

hmmm tried explaining 2666 to someone and they said it sounded a lot like HoL. almost picked it up based on that but i must of done a shitty job of explaining 2666.

I'm only 1 book into 2666 but I really don't see it other than you could kill someone with a blow round the head of either.

Basically all this means I can go with the intransigent opinions, but I haven't got a shred of experience to back them up (unless the expertise has been provided by alcohol), thus wd quickly be revealed exposed. This is no good for extended trolling.

& this absolutely otm. There are surprisingly often clear winners & losers in aggressive literary arguments, & it does often come down to who can actually talk concretely about the works in question. After many years getting caught out in the ring, I now need alcohol to drop the scruples & get to that 'No Haruki, let ME tell YOU a thing or two about Japanese literature' stage.

There's the answer to livening up this thread right there.

I'd like to see BookGeir confronted with a pile of pomo fiction. Sparks would start coming out of his ears and his head would spin round.

No, he breaks out the zings.

Just finished The Line of Beauty and adored it. But I can see how a TV adaptation wouldn't necessarily work. The joy of it is in Hollinghurst's eye for detail and human motivation and his ear for a turn of phrase.

Liked Heartbreaking Work at the time, being 10 years younger, recently bereaved myself and more tolerant of the cutesy, smart-alecky bullshit that would come to bedevil the 00s, but I can't imagine ever rereading it. His subsequent novel was horrible but I hear that his non-fiction books about Africa and Katrina are an improvement.

Re: House of Leaves, I don't see how it's important, or radical, or dissertation-worthy, but it's a fun way to tell a horror story. Channelling Eco, Calvino, Nabokov et al into a genre story with real scares was just enormously entertaining, and if for some people it acts as a gateway drug to other pomo fiction that's great. I'd imagine that encountering people who are really obsessed with it would get on my nerves, but if I'd read it when I was 19 maybe I'd have gone that route, who knows?

22. Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (2003)
(77 points, four votes)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_f1mNt1Xz9QQ/Sqkw28l6GwI/AAAAAAAAAX4/tkuG72uBsZQ/s400/20080515235626_pattern_recognition.jpg

EZ Snappin:
This is the first time Gibson seemed to love his characters as much as
his ideas, which made them and him all the better

woofwoofwoof:
I find Gibson so mysterious - like he's always got this great eye, and
scrubbed, precise style built on the eye and amazing cultural sense,
but I can pick up one book (eg Spook Country, All Tomorrow's Parties),
simply not give a shit and stop reading; then start Pattern
Recognition and just find it storming entertainment, great fun and
completely engaging. The forum addiction stuff should of course means
this wins.

c/d: pattern recognition
William Gibson C/D

"Pattern Recognition" is great. If you live in London, Tokyo or NYC and read message boards, you will love it.
― Simeon (Simeon), Thursday, January 30, 2003 5:30 PM (7 years ago)

I LOVE Pattern Recognition. It's set in the present day, but it still feels like the future when he's talking about iMac's and e-mail. Not that that's the point, it's just a great book...I can't tell if his writing has gotten better or if I can just appreciate it more now.
― Jordan (Jordan), Sunday, February 9, 2003 8:05 PM (7 years ago)

I sorry but I gotta disagree about Pattern Recognition... I am only about 80 pages in but I am *this* close to giving up, it is so shockingly badly written... I really liked Neuromancer and Mona Lisa, but PR just feels like he's way out of his depth. A few choice examples -
1. Appalling attention to detail (though I only have an uncorrected proof so maybe this will change), eg Bow Road changes into Bow Street mid-story
2. Set in London and Gibson clearly has no grasp of how the city works - he refers to Camden as Camden Town throughout (surely no-one really does this?!), but gives street names without the suffix, eg, "down Parkway and over to Aberdeen, the market street that runs it's single block into Camden." Has a bigwig character supposedly rolling in it living in Bow Quarter, oh dear.
3. Technological details are hamfisted - endless references to googling which come across very badly. On the plus side, the story revolves around an ILX-style online community which is pretty well observed.
4. The main character is supposedly fixated with logos to the extent that she has the buttons on her 501s filed down to remove branding - why the fuck doesn't she just buy them from George at Asda then?? no problems with evil logos then. Her motivations appeared to have no internal logic.
The whole thing just has the feel of something that your dad would write which you would roll your eyeballs at - a shame because the central premise (no spoilers) is fascinating, but I just can't get beyond the clunky prose.
Oh well, just my tuppenceworth.
― reclusive hero (reclusive hero), Thursday, February 13, 2003 2:23 PM (6 years ago)

it's great. started it late last night and am 222 pages into it already, would've been more but i had to go and sign on 8)
particularly fond of the cover and the way all the london places he mentions (apart from the vegan restaurant) are places i know well. and the way that every other page he'll just throw a phrase in that has never been coined before but which is just perfect and instantly recognisable ('Zaprudered', the whole 'mirror-world' thing...)
― koogs (koogs), Tuesday, May 20, 2003 5:43 PM (6 years ago)

Shit, I stopped reading him after Mona Lisa Overdrive, or was it maybe a bit of The Difference Engine. Sounds like a I shd give him another go. Neuromancer is amazing, nothing's quite had the same effect since.