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

Phew! And if you liked that lot, here's the Best comic of the 00s nomination thread, which seems to still be at the nominations stage.

Another interlude - I'm half way through Updike's "Terrorist". It was first published in 2006 so it would have qualified for our poll if it had been nominated. Thus far it has been superb and has really created a convincing world which attempts to explain why some educated young people are drawn to extremism in our western societies. Without knowing it until now it's a book I've been waiting for ever since 9/11 and even more so since British born terrorists attacked their own capital city. In some ways I thought that McEwan's "Saturday" attempted a similar thing in relation to the British perception of the Iraq war but Updike's prose is a notch above even McEwan's accomplished writing. To be totally frank I'm in awe of Updike's craft. He combines excellent story-telling with fantastic poetic and insightful prose together with ideas transmitted through his characters which offer suggestions as to how to understand different sides' motivations and pathologies. He manages to do all this in a straightforward way which is not pretentious or condescending to the reader.

That's interesting, because I recall it getting pretty much across-the-board bad reviews. I haven't read it myself probably partly as a result of that, though I think I do own a copy (my library's getting a bit out-of-hand).

The first Updike I read was Couples and to be honest I found it a bit of a slog. It was such an unexpected joy to find the Rabbit books and discover how easy and natural they are. In a way they have also put me off investigating other Updike - I get that sometimes when I find an album by a band which is so perfect that I feel no need to hear anything else they've done (e.g. Television, Joy Division, Jane's Addiction).

I just remember reading that Updike hired a driver to drive him around NJ or wherever the action takes place in that book so he could look out the window as 'research.'

Rabbit Run was fantastic as are many of his early stories, but beyond that I never got Updike.

Yes, I'm somewhat surprised that "Terrorist" is so good (thus far) too. It has sat on my bookshelf since last summer and like Ismael I was nervous to start reading it since I thought it couldn't live up to Rabbit. It may not actually be quite as good as the Rabbit books but thus far it is still top notch. Another reason why I was sceptical about it is that I've been constantly let down by books on fundamentalism. We'll see if it keeps this high standard up to the end of the book...

""the cutesy, smart-alecky bullshit that would come to bedevil the 00s" — this is kind of egregious imo, given how big of an egg Eggers makes about sincerity and meaning it. Yeah, there's a deal of formal cuteness hanging around, but if you look back at the last decade and think 'formal cuteness' is any kind of cultural dominant you're looking through a very odd-shaped lens"

Egregious? Hmm. Not best-placed right now to go into detail but I don't think cutesy and sincere are opposed in Eggersworld. I'm not talking about cold-blooded formal experimentation here. In certain novels, music and indie (or faux indie movies) sincerity is surrounded with gimmicks, tweeness, strained wackiness and knowingness as if can't stand on its own - see White Teeth, Foer, Little Miss Sunshine, etc. I found it refreshing in HWOFSG because it was a bereavement memoir but less so elsewhere.

oh, i wouldn't deny that a vein of that stuff exists ... if you think it is unavoidable enough to describe as 'bedeviling' the decade you are consuming the wrong media imo

also that comic book list is like the reverse of the order it should be in

Y'know, I feel like a poetry countdown.

15p. Landing Light - Don Paterson (3 points)

You make for the bog, but then wisely decide 
that essaying a moonlit, lugubrious slash 
à la what-his-puss might not be such a great move, 
given it could take a Gödel or Fermier 
to work out the spatiotemporal consequence 
of that act...
-
To the academy's swift and unannounced inspection: 
this page knows nothing of its self-reflexion, 
its author-death, or its mise-en-abîme. 
Relax! Things are exactly as they seem. 
The charge of being clever, coy or cute 
I will not even bother to refute, 
there being no I to speak of.

14p. Elegy On A Toy Piano - Dean Young (6 points)

You don't need a pony
to connect you to the unseeable
or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all important ways
one is on one's own.

You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit.
Your tongue a honeycomb.

Necessary it is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out
and necessary it is to die.
Even for the trees, even for the pony
connecting you to what can't be grasped.

The injured gazelle falls behind the
herd. One last wild enjambment.

Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world
but the world is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.

When something becomes ash,
there's nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.

13p. Jab - Mark Halliday (6 points)

Under my Administration
(in which each Cabinet member will have many, many long legal pads)

if you were standing frozen in sweated confusion
at the Personal Furnishings rack
in a giant department store five days before Christmas
wearing a woolly jacket that belonged to someone long gone
and trying not to seem dangerous
under silver and scarlet decorations with no conception
of adequate reply to tremendous departures

you'd be a notable American event.

12p. Second Space - Czeslaw Milosz (7 points)

Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades 
Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind 
That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog, 
Tossed the leaves of the trees. The headlights of cars 
Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.
-
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

11p. The Ice Age - Paul Farley (8 points)

Dead fish in uniform, oblivious
to dinner-ladies’ sticks poking their ribs,
still wash up on my mind’s floor when it rains
in school hours. Blink if you remember this.
-
Your numbers fall and it’s tempting to think
you’re deserting our suburbs and estates
like your cousins at Pompeii; that when you return
to bathe in dust and build your nests again
in a roofless world where no one hears your cheeps,
only a starling’s modem mimicry
will remind you of how you once supplied
the incidental music of our lives.

10p. Hot White Andy - Keston Sutherland (9 points)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMTted_5tA

9p. Cold Calls - Christopher Logue (9 points)

Aphrodite (dressed
in grey silk lounge pyjamas piped with gold
and snakeskin flip-flops)
-
And now your bum!
Your Holy Bum! Your Sacred Bum!
The Bum of Paradise!
-
Your blubber-bummed wife with her gobstopper nipples
cannot stand Troy because Troy's Paris put her last
when we stripped off for him
-
Avoid humanity
Remember - I am God.
I see the bigger picture.

8p. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (11 points)

Rae Armantrout “Generation”:

We know the story.

She turns
back to find her trail
devoured by birds.

The years; the
undergrowth.

-

Dean Young’s “Speck”:

What I have in common with the people of the future:
they don’t exist either.
What I have in common with people of the past:
Mother forgets me, I’m late for work.
Oh exquisite hammer, you liar.
The monkey do be loop da loop
in orthopedic shoes. Down monkey, down!
...

7p. Simon Armitage - Gawain and the Green Knight (11 points)

Gawain,' said the green knight, 'By God, I'm glad
the favour I've called for will fall from your fist.
You've perfectly repeated the promise we've made
and the terms of the contest are crystal clear.
Except for one thing: you must solemnly swear
that you'll seek me yourself; that you'll search me out
to the ends of the earth to earn the same blow
as you'll dole out today in this decorous hall.'
'But where will you be? Where's your abode?
You're a man of mystery, as God is my maker.
Which court do you come from and what are you called?
There is knowledge I need, including your name,
then by wit I'll work out the way to your door
and keep to our contract, so cross my heart.'
'But enough at New Year. It needs nothing more,'
said the war-man in green to worthy Gawain.
'I could tell you the truth once you've taken the blow;
if you smite me smartly I could spell out the facts
of my house and home and my name, if it helps,
then you'll pay me a visit and vouch for our pact.
Or if I keep quiet you might cope much better,
loafing and lounging here, looking no further. But
you stall!
Now grasp that gruesome axe
and show your striking style.'

woofwoofwoof:
This is a really nice fit: I'd given up on Armitage not long after
Book of Matches (thought he'd lost his spark, chasing posterity a bit,
and my own anti-indie turn didn't help me follow the indiest of
mainstream poets), but I think the Gawain-poet suited him: there's fun
in the story, and it shares Armitage's knack for understated flash
(showing off in a laconic tone, if you see what I'm getting at).

6p. John Burnside - The Light Trap (11 points)

the sound of water rushing through the pines
towards us     and a scent

unfolding from the earth, to draw us in

- a history of light
and gravity     - no more -

for this is how the world
occurs: not piecemeal
but entire
and instantaneous

the way we happen:

woman     blackbird     man

5p. Stress Position - Keston Sutherland (13 points)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31U5fbPrcLI

4p. Dirt - Alice Oswald (16 points)

I said the dirt gets right into your fingers 
living under the trees like this the toads don’t mind it 
this is God’s honest truth there’s one about as big as a bucket 
hops out of the nettles every night you can say what you like 
that’s him slugging about the village bent-headed 
heavily laden with the cold you can tell it’s him 
spilikin knees always wet for some reason 
always poking the verges looking for a tasty bit of nothing 
always wet for some reason always standing like a bale in the rain 
remembering better times whereas naming no names 

some of us would rather not remember something 
some of us have got enough bloody nightmares already 
somebody a bundle of nerves ever since the wall came down 
won’t barely go out of the church now 
ever since a bat swooped in like a pair of leather gloves feeling her face 
had to dive under the pews for cover this is God’s honest truth

woofwoofwoof:
This is just a very good long poem. That's unusual. She has a nice ear.

3p. War Music - Christopher Logue (21 points)

Rat. 
  Pearl.
  Onion.
  Honey:
These colours came before the Sun
  Lifted above the ocean,
Bringing light
  Alike to mortals and Immortals.
  And through this falling brightness,
Through the by now:
  Mosque,
  Eucalyptus,
  Utter blue,
Came Thetis,
Gliding across the azimuth,
With armour the colour of moonlight laid on her forearms;
Her palms upturned;
Her hovering above the fleet;
Her skyish face towards her son.
  Achilles,
Gripping the body of Patroclus
Naked and dead against his own,
While Thetis spoke:
  "Son..."
His soldiers looking on;
Looking away from it; remembering their own;
  "Grieving will not amend what Heaven has done.
Suppose you throw your hate after Patroclus' soul.
Who besides Troy will gain?
  See what I've brought..."
  And as she laid the moonlit armour on the sand
It chimed;
  And the sound that came from it
Followed the light that came from it,
Like sighing,
Saying,
  Made in Heaven.

woofwoofwoof:
One of my favourite post-war translations: a great Homer for the age -
makes Archaic Greece seem truly strange, more daring than Fagles, much
happier shredding the page & going for big effects than most British
poetry, a sharp eye and pulls off unexpected tricks - epic simile fuck
yeah. You often get a real sense of men arguing by ships on a long
beach and then fighting, the physical heart of the Iliad - that's
missing in translations that are gunning for heroism/drama/trad
poetry. Good decade for translations over here - the fresh volumes of
this, Simon Armitage's Gawain and Heaney was busy.

2p. Skid - Dean Young (21 points)

I went to the grocery store 
and pressed my ear against the butter 
and it cried out and I pressed my ear 
against the paper towels and they cried out 
but of what I cannot tell.  All was 
as one jellied equation that ended 
with the symbol for oblivion although 
it could have been a mistake, 
something half-erased.  Obviously, 
there was no question about going down 
the catfood lightbulb hygiene aisle. 
We had been warned maybe a thousand times 
to enjoy ourselves but outside, the sky 
had turned fustian and doggy, there was 
rain then sunshine making the executives 
with umbrellas go from looking like geniuses 
to prim morons.  Oh how I wanted my lips 
pressed against your parachute jacket but 
you were wearning your cloak of not-being-there. 
Is all that a culture can hope to produce 
interesting ruins for the absent gods 
to sweep their metal detectors through? 
Surely, I am not the one to ask.

that was a terrible poem.

you're a terrible poem

yeah but at least i rhyme

:)

That's why it's only #2 I guess (these are only extracts obviously - don't think anyone would appreciate me reproducing the whole book)

1p. IFLIFE - Bob Perelman (24 points)

After the catastrophe, the bathwater dusted itself off,
as best it could, and dried its eyes.
The baby, the baby. Everybody likes the baby, loves the baby,
The baby’s everybody’s everything:
avant-garde, traditional, rhymes, it’s free, improvisational,
great mimic, speak Thai, it learns Thai, French French,
and it’s loving, looks you straight in the eye,
no stranger anxiety, trusting, dimples, that little smile, toothless,
hair just growing in, the whole nine yards,
you like it and it likes that.

that was a terrible poem.

It really was a terrible poem.

I think of myself as a person who reads poetry but I'm not anymore. I feel bad about having put no poetry on my ballot but I couldn't think of anything? I was like "What about Mark Levine's first book" but I looked it up and geez, it's from 1993.

I'm still learning the basics, which considering it is an art older than novels doesn't really give me times to specify brand new stuff.

I could have voted for the collected August Kleinzahler except I haven't read it -- I would have been voting for the books contained in it which came out before 2000. Cheating.

Most of the poetry got a single vote but a few scored doubles, meaning there were 18 or 19 separate votes for those fifteen on the list - or in other words, roughly every other voter found space for some poetry, it wasn't just woofwoofwoof filling his ballot with verse.

I'm quite impressed I must say - if it weren't for Simon Armitage having been a fixture on 90s Mark Radcliffe, I couldn't have named you a poet myself. It's been worthwhile finding these extracts, but actually reading them properly isn't half hard work.

never read poetry

really like that Alice Oswald extract tho

___________________________________
      AND NOW, THE TOP TWENTY
___________________________________

20. Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed - Jared Diamond (2004)
(79 points, three votes, one first-placed vote)

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/2376/collapsem.jpg

I am currently reading Collapse by Jared Diamond - subtitled something like: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed. I'm a bit more than halfway through it.
It presents many scenarios drawn from history and archaeology where a society has established itself, seemed to thrive and then flamed out in some sort of self-inflicted disaster. Examples: Easter Island, the Norse Greenland colony of Eric the Red, the Maya of Yucatan. It shows how environmental distress and long-continued bad choices contributed to their collapse.
Alternatively, he presents scenarios of several societies coping with these stresses successfully. Examples: Tokugawa Japan dealing with deforestation problems, islands in Polynesia learning to deal with isolation and sustainability issues.
In the last part of the book I haven't read he gathers examples from modern states, then draws up broad conclusions on how to avoid getting driven to the wall as a society.

Impressions: It's a great concept and it assembles a large mass of information and mostly manages to synthesize it. There's a lot of incisive thinking going on here, even if it's not quite as fresh or new as Guns, Germs and Steel.
The only problem is that it seems a bit doughy and underdone, like it needed a longer time in the oven. I expect the publisher was overly anxious to capitalize on the success of Guns, Germs and Steel and rushed it out about a year too soon. It's not like it's badly written or organized, it's just a bit on the slack side and could have used some tightening up. This happens a lot these days.
― Aimless (Aimless), Wednesday, August 17, 2005 4:08 PM (4 years ago)

Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel."
this is perhaps the greatest book ever written.
― DV (dirtyvicar), Friday, March 26, 2004 11:32 PM (5 years ago)

Jared Diamond, the biologist well-known for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed comments in the latter about how stunning the progress in among Papua New Guinea (where he spent much of his academic career) has been. In two generations the locals in the highlands have gone from the stone age to proficient technicians. As I recall, there was a brief argument that the primary determinents of fitness until quite recently was hunting/food gathering success and social prowess, all of which have a intelligence factor. By contrast, in the more densely populated western world since agriculture, and especially the more urbanized western world of the past 500 or so years, the most important element to passing your genes on was resistance to infectious disease. Its very possible that given identical quality environments and raised similarly, populations who achieved modern means of production & social architecture more recently might be more predisposed to high intelligence than those of European descent. We'll never know, as that experiment is practically impossible.
The best we can do is figure out what environmental/social conditions work to make high attainment possible, and improve access to those fundaments.
― derelict, Wednesday, February 18, 2009 9:57 PM (11 months ago)

eerste 40 pagina's fenomenaal en ik kreeg ook nog Collapse: How Societies Choose To Succeed or Suck Eggs van Jared Diamond. Pfff, ik weet niet of ik die "goed nieuws show wel uit kan lezen, maar het ziet er interessant uit.
― OMC, Tuesday, May 13, 2008 8:02 PM (1 year ago)

eerste 40 pagina's fenomenaal en ik kreeg ook nog Collapse: How Societies Choose To Succeed or Suck Eggs van Jared Diamond. Pfff, ik weet niet of ik die "goed nieuws show wel uit kan lezen, maar het ziet er interessant uit.
― OMC, Tuesday, May 13, 2008 8:02 PM (1 year ago)

how bizarre

The De Subjectivisten quotes have all been awesome! I don't know if they are there for lols or because everyone except me can read Dutch.

I have just received a book token. This thread is my new best friend.

I loved Simon Armitage in the 90s thanks to aforementioned Mark Radcliffe guesting, and when I sadly had to miss him doing a recital - if that is the word - near me recently I realised I had all of his 90s books and none from the 00s. Think Gawain is a must-buy.

A little for lols (how come the Dutch edition of this one gets the really cool title?!), a little because this is an inclusive thread, and a little because I always feel I can almost understand them - 'fenomenaal' sounds like a review worth including!

I always feel I can almost understand them

Ha, yes. Good point re inclusivity.

"*Nobody Belongs Here More Than You van Miranda July. Ai, dit is pijnlijk." <- this is the extent of my full-sentence Dutch comprehension. I lolled

(and I like the book - or at least, really liked some stories, the others are written in crepey character so dislike may be the point - but enough about 50 places ago)

the first 40 pages are phenomenal and i believe eggnog Collapse: How Societies Choose To Succeed or Suck Eggs by Jared Diamond. Pffft, i don't know if i'd say it's 'good news' reading why cos it look intersting

19. Consider The Lobster - David Foster Wallace (2005)
(80 points, eight votes)

http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/41ADZOObB%2BL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

jabba hands:
superhuman clarity of thought and expression and an obvious huge fascination with and love for life, he just seems like the best most loveable dude ever basically, and i wish he had been able to overcome his illness :(

david foster wallace: classic or dud
david foster wallace - is he a cunt?
David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer in the NY Times

Consider The Lobster is more or less business as usual for Wallace. Like most of his non-fiction (I can’t vouch for the maths stuff) it’s all humour, self-consciousness and footnotes, and it’s often pretty damned insightful to boot. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I thought that the Republican candidacy campaign as covered in Up Simba was pretty much the perfect jump-off point for one of Wallace’s recurring themes: the potentially harmful effects of a cynical, seen-it-all-so-who-cares postmodernist world view.
― David A (David A), Friday, March 17, 2006 5:39 PM (3 years ago)

Loved Consider the Lobster -- I think at this point he's more extraordinary as an essayist and journalist than he is as a writer of fiction. But part of that, I think, might be because he seems to have exhausted his original style as a writer of fiction -- it wouldn't surprise me if, years down the road, he got a second wind in a different, more developed style.
― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, January 10, 2007 4:17 PM (3 years ago)

I finished Consider the Lobster, which was mostly entertaining. It convinced me that DFW is very bright, curious, verbally ultradexterous, enthusiastic - and a pot smoker; it just had that giddy-stoned feeling written all over it, but this was redeemed by the other qualities I mentioned.
The other thing this book made me think about was the way that our current version of western civilization is smothering under needless and pointless details, and the great analytical impulse that has carried WCiv for centuries now spends the majority of its force in the microanalysis of stupefyingly complex trivialities. This is the reflexive Thoureauvian in me.
The one essay on Dostoevsky was especially poignant for this reason. In it DFW exposes a deep yearning after the nineteenth century's comfort with writing and reading about all the large, basic themes of human life and thought - and then he talks himself out of following his heart's desire, wistfully citing the inability of his audience to follow him there. My impulse was to tell him, write the book you want to write and let it find its own audience.
― Aimless (Aimless), Wednesday, January 17, 2007 6:37 PM (3 years ago)

are you doing all 20 today?

I won't be able to get all twenty up - it takes ages to search for decent quotes and the occasional amusing picture. I'm aiming for ten today, ten tomorrow.

ok. but either way, you iz amazing for doing all this.

Ha, ok, so know I now where all but three of my votes stand.

That is a odd little list of poetry. I should check out the Paul Farley. I remember not really thinking much of Tramp in Flames, but it was a cursory read.

I don't read as much contemporary poetry as I should, tbh, so my votes felt a bit gauche, as though I should have been yelling about Salt Press stuff or bemoaning John Hartley Williams' neglect or something similar. And it's tricky to figure out my own relationship to poetry sometimes: I liked Dart a lot, but thought more about eg Geoffrey Hill or Paul Muldoon, who only sporadically produce affection in me & do annoy me, but offer verbal/cerebral/formal things to get lost in. I took simple pleasures in the end I suppose.

(I have changed my login name because it was long and stupid. Please SB me again if my repetition of critical commonplaces/comments about fantasy novels have offended you before)

I could never muster the enthusiasm to attempt Infinite Jest - it didn't look like my kind of thing at all - but DFW's endlessly questioning brain produces a fascinating brand of journalism. Amazing essays on John McCain, talk radio, the porn industry and crustaceans. Reading it, I found that he was always about three steps ahead of me - as soon as I thought, "But isn't that an oversimplification? What about x and y?" there was another tangent or footnote dealing with x and y. A truly moral and searching writer but you can see why an intellect that relentless must have been hard to live with.

Re: what I was talking about earlier - the desire for, and yet reflexive suspicion of, sincerity - I think DFW cut to the core of that contradiction better than anyone.

18. Q - Luther Blissett (2003)
(80 points, three votes, one first-placed vote)

http://www.thisisanfield.com/images/barnes_watford.jpg

ledge:
More history than Umberto Eco, More violence and cursing than, well,
Umberto Eco. In a way this really feels like a history lesson
delivered by the people at the time, alive and urgent rather than dry,
academic, and dull. Plus it's an allegory of the rise and fall of the
60s social revolutions. Probably.

Luther Blissett

The Blissett cult sprang to public prominence with the arrest in 1997 of four young Italians travelling without tickets on a tram in Rome. When asked for their identities, they heard the footballer's name on a radio and insisted they were all called Luther Blissett. They later (unsuccessfully) claimed in court that "a collective identity does not need a ticket".

Derring do and doctrinal theology set during the Reformation. Yay!
― Wooden (Wooden), Sunday, August 1, 2004 6:17 PM (5 years ago)

i've just picked up 'Q' by Luther Blissett. i think subconsciously i was hoping it would be like Eco, but without being 'Baudolino' or 'The Island...'. i suppose we'll see
...
okay, so 'Q' was a load of crap. now i'm reading 'Rommel? Gunner Who?' by Spike Milligan. can't go wrong with Spike. not like Italians.
― writingstatic (writingstatic), Tuesday, February 24, 2004 10:20 PM (5 years ago)

I hadn't heard of this and I must confess to having been amazingly confused for a bit there. Sounds interesting.