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

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      AND NOW, THE TOP TWENTY
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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.

can someone tell me more about that mark halliday book?

Anyone want to go into more detail about Q? First black player to score England if I'm not mistaken?

i'm not being a dick....but isn't that john barnes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_%28nom_de_plume%29

The book's a wannabe erudite-but-earthy historico-political thrilleresque romp across europe during the reformation, gore and violence cheek-by-jowl with middle-ages theology, back when doctrinal disputes really were a matter of life and death. The whodunnit aspect of the thriller is pretty half-hearted but aside from that it's all good fun. And educational! A kind of Horrible Histories for adults maybe.

I think that was kind of the point. Italian scouts came to Watford - they'd heard there was this great black player there (John Barnes), but when they went Luther Blisset played a blinder and got signed for AC Milan. Of course they just played in triangles round him and the poor bloke was completely lost.

Became a sort of running joke amongst Italians, a symbolic philosophical example of how things can go chaotically/amusingly wrong and thus became the name of that anarchic collective.

ah xpost to darraghmac

Gah, not again.

I feel a bit bad about reviving that old chestnut because Luther seems like such a lovely bloke. I had to use that pic though because the photographer seems ludicrously close to the action, like Barnes is about to take him on next.

Enjoyed that little poetry run down. Woof/3 completely otm about the Logue and the real sense of men on beaches arguing and then fighting - this has probably been my favourite poetry of recent times, poetry not afraid of crude or violent images.

I like Armitage more as a figure than as a writer these days. Saw him do a reading of his book Little Green Men once and it was really appealing, worked much better than just reading it myself in fact. He's a really nice chap and a fan of The Fall, so I go a long way to defend him, but doesn't quite cut it for me any more. Enjoyed what I read of the Gawain, but then I read his latest poems in the TLS and they're just horrible, almost self-parody - no, that's not true, there's still a quiet domesticity, a concern with how normal people live ordinary lives, that is appealing, but the pseudo meditative single utterances, which are presumably designed to resonate ('A shelf. A chair.') rather make me snigger I'm afraid.

Definitely interested in the Alice Oswald.

One thing this list is doing, for which I'm extremely grateful (aside from introducing me to a load of new stuff) is make me want to read more new books and poetry, which is just great.

Ah, good to know Ismael. I was told the story by a staunch Watford fan and never really questioned it, but that article seems to make sense. Kind of a shame tho. Although, thinking about it, they probably wouldn't have gone to Watford to see Blissett, maybe he just fit the bill when they saw him, rather than it being an accident.

And yes, he always comes across as a really nice chap.

cool thanks for backstory

He was one of the first black footballers to play for England, and scored a hat-trick on his full international debut - a 9–0 win over Luxembourg. This made him the first black player ever to score a hat-trick for the national team.

My bad.

17. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
(86 points, five votes, one first-placed vote)

http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/kazuo-ishiguro1.jpg

President Keyes:
I’m sure this is considered bad SF, but it stuck with me more than any other book on this list

Alex in Montreal:
I no longer have a copy of this - I lent it to a friend of mine who was struck by a train and passed away four months later. At the time it seemed to be a fairly run of the mill science fiction conceit but two years later, the emotional implications of it have stuck with me. I just saw this in a bookstore yesterday and reread the last chapter and was really disturbed by it. It's all in the voice - innocence to experience in the most devastating way possible.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Devoured Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go on vacation and have a really hard time explaining to people why I loved it so much. It was one of those rare books you love and don't want to share with anyone else.
― zan, Tuesday, September 13, 2005 4:04 PM (4 years ago)

'Never Let Me Go' was very over-rated: second-hand sci-fi ideas told without conviction, set in a world that doesn't ring true the moment you think about how it's all meant to work. But I loved 'Remains of the Day'.
― James Morrison, Tuesday, August 21, 2007 1:34 AM (2 years ago)

Probably my second favourite Ishiguro after The Unconsoled, although still haven't read Remains. That "not ringing true" is a common, and obvious, criticism, but it really didn't bother me. His set-ups are often pretty weird or at least of questionable veracity, what is important is his characters' emotional responses to them.

16. Oblivion - David Foster Wallace (2005)
(87 points, five votes, one first-placed vote)

http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/arts/photos/2008/09/14/david-foster-wallace-getty-.jpg

he story about the baby in Oblivion never fails to amaze me in its brevity and utter desperation.
― the table is the table, Thursday, March 1, 2007 5:17 PM (2 years ago)

Oblivion had moments of intelligence and humanity, and is the best I've read from DFW.
― Chelvis, Tuesday, January 29, 2008 1:45 PM (2 years ago)

no one's mentioned david foster wallace but oblivion is great
― kl0pper, Sunday, January 27, 2008 9:39 PM (2 years ago)

that was my top-placed vote. i can't really explain quite what it is about the the stories in that book, in particular; it's that david foster wallace remains maybe the one writer that i've spoken about, speak about, will speak about with friends and peers and, in doing so, really feel that his work, and talking about it, gets at not just issues of style and taste, but at what style and taste and art are ultimately good for, what they might mean to the way you live your life.

— which ultimately i think is the most you can ask from any artist?

sorry, got lost in the middle of that sentence. oh well.

I'm going to have to read him. I had mentally filed him under 'smart-alecky', possibly just because he was popular on here, but I'm impressed by the real feeling coming through in these tributes.

(Oblivion is really hard to search for, which is why the quotes for it are somewhat brief)

he's kind of the deeply earnest precursor of the mcswys 'i really mean this and this is why i have to make dumb jokes about it, here is a drawing of a stapler' line that a lot of ppl hate, in some ways.

I am a huge DFW fanboy but didn't vote for either of these. Probably should have on the merits, but I think I penalized them unfairly for being less than what he did before.

yeah similar for me (tho i did vote for oblivion)...also i had read almost all of the collected pieces of each prior to these publications so they didnt really have the same impact

I had mentally filed him under 'smart-alecky'

And as for this -- I think a lot of people had him filed there. At times he filed himself there! It seems to me -- and I think this is sort of unavoidable but terrible by the way -- that a lot of people refiled him after his suicide. The particular pain and frustration he wrote about, which had previously been classified by many as "90s post-everything overintellectualized navel-gazing," was suddenly taken seriously as a real problem of the human condition in general and DFW's condition in general. And this sucks, I think! I.E. your suicide shouldnt rebrand you as a Major American Writer and this is DOUBLY true if you merited that status all along. Though of course there is the simple but major upside that lots of people will read his books now who otherwise wouldn't have. But I worry they will read them as being ALL ABOUT the pain and frustration referred to above whereas at his best he makes real the superimposition of that pain and frustration with enjoyment, e.g. in "A Supposedly Fun Thing...." where the cruise ship is NOT something that's fun for the squares and terrifying to the stowaway know-it-all, but something that is fun and seductive and terrifying and lonely-making ALL AT ONCE.

I think this richness is not as present in his later stuff. And I think he himself is partly to blame because of his distrust of his own instinct to make gags. He becomes more dogmatic, more rigid in his choice of effects, more suspicious of the moves he knows well. And so you never again get anything like the crazy Eschaton set-piece in IJ. You get instead the occasional tiny, very controlled masterpiece like "Incarnations of Burned Children."

I'm curious to know how The Pale King will read but based on the pieces that have appeared it's hard to imagine it's not much, much smaller in spirit than the other two novels.

But yeah, still and all, should have voted for these.

15. The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman (2000)
(88 points, nine votes)

http://th04.deviantart.net/fs24/300W/i/2009/009/8/2/Mulefa_from_The_Amber_Spyglass_by_3djinn.jpg

Alex in Montreal:
This is a stand-in vote for the entire trilogy - the audacity of an explicitly agnostic work of children's fantasy whose main villains are the corrupt Church and the Government, and ends with the introduction of gay angels and the death of God is reason enough to recommend it. That it's a deftly-plotted and exciting read is simply a bonus.

HIS DARK MATERIALS

I think he's trying to cram too many ideas in without properly integrating everything, whereas up until then he'd been doing a great job. I mean, it's still hugely powerful, but I just plain don't like the wheelie things.
― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, July 8, 2003 7:23 AM (6 years ago)

it is so good a potraying the final loss of innocence and the onset of adulthood. It is deeply ambiguous what the republic of heaven means and whether it is a good thing or not.
― Ed (dali), Tuesday, July 8, 2003 7:27 PM (6 years ago)

went to see the plays once last march and again last weekend, both in one day each time. the first time was a lot better but both excellent really. i did think it was stupid that they missed out the whole mary malone stuff (and i wanted to see the wheelies) but i can understand why they did it - shit, it's already a six and a half hour marathon - and they kind of made serafina pekkala the mary malone substitute with the temptation/falling thing. some of the writing/acting is a bit clumsy - "oh, look what i can see through my AMBER SPYGLASS", she says, whipping it out and sticking it under lee's nose, but on the whole it's amazing. the first lyra was ten or twenty times better than the new lyra though. the staging is fucking awesome, wish it didn't prevent them from touring it but the only place they could possibly do it is the national. timothy dalton ruled as lord asriel, the new one (christopher/david harewood? something like that) is a bit too angry and frantic. actually this time around the pace of the first half of the first play was a bit screwed up. but if yr thinking of going and haven't yet, go, go, go. it's. fucking. brilliant. and cos it's the national you can always get tickets for a tenner on the day if you go there in person when the box office opens. god i love the national. and philip pullman.
― emsk, Sunday, March 6, 2005 12:02 PM (4 years ago)

Should have given one of the DFW's the #18 vote I gave Amber Spyglass, actually. My vote, too, was really a proxy for the whole trilogy; but the third book was shouty and weak, and for me dropped all the balls so promisingly chucked skyward in Golden Compass.

Re: Never Let Me Go, I preferred When We Were Orphans, perhaps because it had more narrative drive, perhaps because I prefer subverted detective fiction to subverted sci-fi, perhaps because it has a nice, dry sense of humour, or perhaps just because it was the first Ishiguro I read, and apart from The Unconsoled, which is something else entirely, all of them have a very similar unreliable narrative voice and tantalising dripfeed of information, so the first one you encounter tends to have a disproportionately powerful impact (cf Murakami). Of his generation of British writers - Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Rushdie et al - he's by far the most consistently impressive, at least among those I've read, so any Ishiguro on the list is fine by me.

Liked the first two very much - Northern Lights and Subtle Knife, which were very imaginative, inventive children's stories, but The Amber Spyglass felt very pompous and didactic, very like a teacher's book in fact, rather than a storyteller's book.

xpost eephus! - definitely.

I like Armitage more as a figure than as a writer these days.

Yeah, despite my vote I still have mixed feelings about him. He is super likeable (ie is Fall & Prefab Sprout fan), but that literary certainty of address or paced formality, which stops him being a Mersey Poet funster, has taken over a bit - the demotic energy & wit which kicked against that isn't there so much in his original verse now. It feels disappointing given how much I believed in Zoom & Kid; but he's someone I enjoy having around and want to do well, so Gawain pleased me. I haven't looked at his Odyssey tho. Am not sure that'll go so well.

very like a teacher's book in fact, rather than a storyteller's book

Spot on. It really dragged. Plus Pullman just seems to pop up around the place now being kind of pompous & I keep having to remind myself that Northern Lights is v powerful, terrific in imagination & execution & I am not against him.

I mean this could be very good, but I just look at the title and get a sinking feeling.

I thought The Amber Spyglass was terrific. That said, it probably is the weakest of the three, but even its errors (if that's what they were) worked for me in their context - the way it rushed through everything meant I kind of lost track of what was going on (God's dead? what? who?) but that evoked civilisation crumbling; and the lack of strong sense of place from the first book in particular conjured a strong mental image of a world of ash, like The Road, or a vague sense of purgatory.

I'm curious to know how The Pale King will read but based on the pieces that have appeared it's hard to imagine it's not much, much smaller in spirit than the other two novels.

seriously? 'the soul is not a smithy'?

echoing all of what's been said wrt the first two golden compass books setting up something wonderful, magnificent, important?, third book just collapsing under that pressure/weight.

Someone gave me a copy of Northern Lights last week but I saw The Golden Compass and it was so fucking dire that I don't really understand why anyone would want to spend time on the whole thing.

movies of books are generally shitty and dumbed down?

I saw The Scarlet Letter/Bonfire of the Vanities/The Human Stain and they were so fucking dire that I don't really understand why anyone would want to spend time on Hawthorne, Wolfe or Roth.

i saw shakespeare in love and tbh i really can't see what all the fuss is about. 'bard' my ass.