what are your favourite novels post-2000?

Provoked suddenly by finishing Zadie Smith's On Beauty and wondering if it should be on such a list - of ten, say? I wondered what else would be on my list and realized it would be very mainstream indeed.

(let's say post-2000 includes 2000, here)

wow, this board can't handle the humble apostrophe; or I can't (apos).

2666.

Making a list of the best 10 novels of the 2000's is proving more difficult than I first thought. I can't seem to get to 10. But I like this sort of thing, so I'll obsess about it some more.

i'm going to be interested in what ppl put here bcz i dont read enough current fiction. agree w/ jim that 2666 is definitely on the list tho

yes, it's harder than it should be - my list will doutbless be impoverished, in a sense, in its obviousness, though I love and admire some of these recent books.

THE CORRECTIONS? I think so.

My list would look something like this:

1. Nowhere Man, Hemon
2. White Teeth, Smith
3. Cloud Atlas, Mitchell
4. The Intuitionist, Whitehead
5. Shadow Country, Matthiessen
6. The Hakawati, Alameddine
7. Bee Season, Goldberg
8. The Human Stain, Roth
9. Kafka On the Shore, Murakami
10. The Devil and Miss Prym, Coelho

All of these novels have flaws, but I'm happy to have read them.

this is sort of hard for me because my taste has changed so much in the last 9 years--stuff i loved when i was a freshman in high school is totally different from stuff i loved when i was a freshman in college is totally different from stuff now

Off the top of my head, I'd include these:

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira
2666, Roberto Bolano
The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas

off the top of my head, not counting short story collections

1. bolano, 2666
2. jonathan lethem, fortress of solitude
3. david mitchell, black swan green (cloud atlas is still on my shelf waiting to be read)
4. arthur phillips (i can't single out one of his novels as being really outstanding, but i like his work as a whole)
5. richard price, lush life
6. haruki murakami, kafka on the shore
7. colson whitehead, sag harbor (because i just read it, and because the intuitionist is '99)
8. junot diaz, the brief wondrous life of oscar wao
9. samuel delany, dark reflections
10. orhan pamuk, my name is red

Aira has a new book coming out, or is out already, which is very good. Ghosts.

Shit, this is hard. Must think.

its cool to see ppl repping david mitchell i had to interview him once around when cloud atlas come out and he was a total bro despite me writing a kind of meh review of the book. not that ive met or interviewed that many writers but he was the coolest of those that ive met.

these kinds of lists are pretty flawed i guess + im for sure forgetting really awesome stuff + savage detectives was 98 but i read it in 07 + runaway has some of the best writing post-2000 but isnt a novel + i have pretty terrible taste, obv

black flies: burke
call be your name: aciman
cold six thousand: elroy
line of beauty: hollinghurst
lightning on the sun: bingham
memories of ice: erikson
netherland: o'neill
russian debutante's handbook: shteyngart
storm of swords: martin
veronica: gaitskill

oh 02 should be call me by your name

With all the usual caveats, my fairly mainstream and conventional list:

The Human Stain - Philip Roth
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
The Dream Life of Sukhanov - Olga Grushin
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill

danielewski - house of leaves
houellebecq - elementary particles & platform
jon franzen - the corrections
chris adrien - the children's hospital
sam lipsyte - homeland
jack pendarvis - awesome

did you read adrian's collection of stories he released last year? i wasnt that into children's hospital but i thought the short stories were wonderful and managed all the best bits of his work w/o becoming ridiculous they way the novel could

2666

I hope so! I'm about to start reading it. Not sure what my list would look like, but Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America would be on it.

The Corrections
Twelve
Erasure: (a novel)
Middlesex

?

Hm, I don't really have time to read much contemporary literature these days. I absolutely adore Ben Marcus' Notable American Women, though (released in 2002).

Also, I haven't read it yet but I must give more promotion to my friend Chris Killen's new novel The Bird Room, which I'm sure will be top 10 of the decade, yeah!

xp haven't gotten to adrien's collection. i know i had read one of his that was sort of coming-of-age & 9/11 themed that i liked a lot that i would guess was in there

I need to re-read it, but I really really loved Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper.

roughly in this order

Toni Morrison: A Mercy
Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
Toni Morrison: Love
McCarthy: The Road
Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Richard Powers: The Echo Maker
Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty.
Nicholson Baker: A Box of Matches

i can't think of any others i love but if i could go back to 1999 i would include Morrison's Paradise and Coetzee's Disgrace. fwiw i loathed the 150 or so pages i read of 2666.

Maybe i would put The Corrections on my list too. it's truly great until the last section.

I haven't read most of the novels mentioned, but I'm touched by how a few names that I have keep coming up - The Line of Beauty, Black Swan Green, even On Beauty. My own limited list:

Franzen: The Corrections (at least this is respectable)
Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty (a masterpiece, if cold in a way)
Smith: On Beauty (her masterpiece so far, and not cold at all)
Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude (I am deeply fond of it)
Peace: GB84 (harrowing, desperate, relentless, like life was)
Lennon: Pieces For The Left Hand (readable)
Doyle: Oh Play That Thing! (audacious)
Sansom: Ring Road (likeable)
Bracewell: Perfect Tense (probably his best, good on his great theme of cultural change)
Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (oddly I don't feel so fond in retrospect, but it is stunning)
McEwan: Saturday (perverse - so many despise it, and it has flaws - but I think it has real intelligence too, about a recognizable world)

I don't read too many contemporary novels, so it's a short list:
Tom McCarthy: Remainder
Mitchell: Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green
Pynchon: Against the Day
Houllebecq: Atomised (is this a cheat? 1998 in France apparently)

Interesting that you call The Corrections "respectable", Pinefox. I swithered about including it but left it out on the basis that "favourite" implied "what did you like", not "what did you think was good". I found it very impressive, faults notwithstanding, but only patchily enjoyable. Asked to pick a novel from this period that would be likely to be taught in universities in 20 years time, it would have been at or near the top of my list, along with Gilead; both had an underlying earnestness, even puritanism, that prevented me from enjoying them wholeheartedly. Re-reading might change that.

I preferred Black Swan Green to Cloud Atlas for similar reasons: CA is probably more remarkable but BSG was a much more enjoyable read for me.

x post

yes I did mean 'what did you like', though it could, possibly, be the same thing (but it might not - I know my list is packed with special pleading and old favourites).

I don't think I draw a line between 'impressive' and 'enjoyable', etc. + (a digression?) I can never really understand when people say things like 'I just read it for the story, not critically' - I think of all reading of literature as thoughtful and critical, in some broad sense (doesn't mean you then have to write a book about it).

I thought BSG sounded like it ought to be the best book ever, but it really really disappointed me. Some of it was actively bad. It's a bit like Joyce's Portrait in that one way - it seemed like it ought to be amazing, but didn't do much for me (at 18), and in a way has never really won me over. (another digression: books that don't live up to what they ought to be.)

(Corrections = respectable for me cos I don't think other people will mock me for putting it on a list, as they might re. Bracewell for instance)

of course The Corrections should be on my list. i've no idea why i left it off. even the relative fainlure of the last section can't affect how great the writing and characterisation are.

pinefox, if you loved Fortress of Solitude (which i loved and loathed in equal measure) you need to read "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" ASAP. now that book is audacious. i haven't even finished it yet but it's quite clear that it's one of the best novels of recent years and unless Diaz falls at the last hurdle i don't think i'll be changing my opinion of it.

i wasnt that impressed with oscar wao but it was ambitious in a really good way. so different than something like gilead which is the only book listed so far that i dislike outright altho i never finished the lethem.

oh the corrections. i reread it a few months ago and liked it a lot it was better than remembered more generous and less didactic and self-satisfied. i still think theres a smallness of spirit esp in the denise sections that keeps it from being a great or likeable book too much dont u see dont u see hysterical moralism but its undeniably important

also jed if you havent already read it based on that list i think you might really like call me by your name its a beautiful book imo

Nicholson Baker: A Box of Matches

OTM. I liked Checkpoint a lot too.

My complete list contains about ~20 novels published since 2000, which surprised me since I feel like I barely ever read anything contemporary. Favourites:

Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee
Breath, Tim Winton
Julius Winsome, Gerard Donovan
Europe Central, William Vollmann
Ticknor, Sheila Heti

Re: The Corrections, I liked it a lot.

Lamp, i'll definitely check that out thanks.

the section of the corrections with Gary and the spycam and the booze and the hedge trimmers and the cut hand with the plastic bread bag over it is kind of miraculous.

I would probably nominate "The Feast of the Goat" by Vargas Llosa. But that's quite possibly just because I am a huge Vargas Llosa stan and I think that's his best of the three he's published this decade. Really not sure what critical consensus of his later work is.

McEwan: Saturday (perverse - so many despise it, and it has flaws - but I think it has real intelligence too, about a recognizable world)

does anyone really despise this? its too slight and misguided to despise i think ~~~

where did you find real intelligence pinefox? not tryna bait you atonement was my favorite new book in high school and i still admire mcewan but i thought this book was stupid about ppl and about how they feel (rather than think) their way into and out of problems. also theres no denying the "reflections of a great man on the rabbelous proletariat on the eve a squash match" aspect. its kinda gross no?

didnt love the book when it came out at the big new yorker profile on mcewan last month made me dislike it even more

cmon post a list max

lol i tried and i came up with

2666
the emigrants
the intuitionist

and it turns out that two of those are not even from the 2000s... i guess i dont read enuf contemporary fiction. i didnt know my name is red is post2000, i guess i would include that. um... the known world?

i need 2 go back and look at my bookshelf in NJ

i liked motherless brooklyn more than fortress of solitude so maybe that

o i really loved middlesex when i read it

but like i was saying above that was in 2003 and im very different now than i was, so i dont know if id still love it as much?

great thread thanks people

Like Emily I have only read Notable American Women and nothing else! Maybe Ben Marcus puts people off current fiction or some such...I could read some Bolano, but not before I'm done with my other Latin Americans (Carpentier, Donoso or Cortazar).

motherless brooklyn is '99, max. lol u love the '90s.

this is a good thread for me. i hardly ever read anything new(ish). sebald and alice munro were probably my big discoveries of the last ten years. so, everything by them that fits this time-frame.

i mean, i DO read some new(ish) stuff, but i can't think of anything "great" that i read. mostly just some stuff that i thought was "good" to "pretty good".

i am really fond of reading all about the new hot big books in reviews and essays and articles, but i never actually read them. i know a LOT about franzen and i've never read a word of his fiction.

i figure if something is really good, it'll keep. until i get to it.

Was going to add DFW's Oblivion before checking the thread's title. Have been shocked at how few post 2000 novels I've read. Couldn't finish Line of Beauty (so, so dull). Appreciated The Corrections for its humour and characterisation but then I thought it let itself down (the cruise ship ectsasy stuff). Couldn't finish My Name is Red (I don't know if dull is right, but certainly close). So all I'm doing is compiling a list for a mirror thread: "dullest novels since 2000". I've been saving up Austerlitz so maybe it's waited long enough. Same with Europe Central. Oh, wait, I've just checked my copy of The Royal Family and YES it makes it for 2000.

I think Motherless Brooklyn might well be better than TFoS but like Jordan said, it'd 1999, so not on my list. It's actually one of the most impressive books by anyone anywhere anytime I've ever read.

Lamp, your contempt for Saturday kind of makes the point about whether people despise it. It's too late here now to take it up again, but I don't really agree with you about this book, though as I said and have always said, it's also flawed, maybe sometimes embarrassingly so.

Glad the thread has been a handy provocation to thought for one or two people.

btw cruise ship - bad bit of Corrections yes, maybe? - but there's so much that's fine, and sometimes, to me, very funny. which is more than I can say about some people.

Well, I was curious enough about JF to read Strong Motion recently. I've been reading my way through his non-fiction and memoir stuff, which is pretty appealing, and has a more relaxed ability to be humorous. I found the cruise ship stuff just plain embarrassing.

i'm having the same problem - i don't keep up with new fiction at all, and i think probably 90% of the new stuff i've read has probably been for school.

happy to see the corrections mentioned here so often, as that is def the first one that springs to mind.
'7 types of ambiguity' by eliot perlman (i THINK this is post-2000).
'the raw shark texts' by steven hall
'tooth and claw' by t.c. boyle
'the vintner's luck' by elizabeth knox
'weep not my wanton' by maggie dubris

OK, given this is liable to change at any time, a baker's dozen...

Tobias Wolff: Old School
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31Ggr6-HAKL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Cormac McCarthy: The Road
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/033044753X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Susanna Jones: The Missing Person's Guide to Love
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515Y0jcgO8L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Robert Charles WIlson: The Chronoliths
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000PC0USU.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Tom Drury: The Driftless Area
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0802143040.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Ian McEwan: Atonement (but NOT the film)
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51B82D14AYL._SS500_.jpg

Jincy Willett: Winner of the National Book Award
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/031242423X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Jonathan Raban: Surveillance
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/510Vcl1J%2BoL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Jim Shepard: Project X
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/140004071X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Rebecca Smith: A Bit of Earth
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31PGR463XZL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Stacy Sims: Swimming Naked

Sarah Waters: Fingersmith

..but most of what I read is older stuff, so I haven't, for example, read '2666' or 'on Beauty' or 'The Corrections' and so on yet, PLUS some of my favourite fiction this century is short story collections, like Alice Munro. But I'll stop equivocating now.This was fun!

Not sure what happened at the end there.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0670032905.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1860498825.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

I quite like the chick on The Driftless Area.

(Yes short stories would be another category - maybe if one did that it should be fave story, not fave collection.)

Atonement is probably better than Saturday. But I've read Saturday more often and in some obvious ways it's closer to home.

I'm really enjoying this thread. James I swithered about putting Fingersmith (or Night Watch) on my list. Definitely bubbling under.

In fact most of the novels I've read on other peoples' lists I considered for mine. I'm hugely surprised at the amount of consensus. Exceptions are Oscar Wao, Fortress of Solitude, Atonement and Saturday: all four have very good things in them, but I knew straightaway they weren't going to make my top 10. The only book listed so far that I actively disliked was The Road.

Lamp, your contempt for Saturday kind of makes the point about whether people despise it. It's too late here now to take it up again, but I don't really agree with you about this book, though as I said and have always said, it's also flawed, maybe sometimes embarrassingly so.

i dont think its contempt - i certainly didnt mean my criticism that way like i sd i mostly think its misguided and v much blind to its own shortcomings. not sure why you think its too late to talk about the book either altho if yr sick of debating it fair cop

Well, I was curious enough about JF to read Strong Motion recently. I've been reading my way through his non-fiction and memoir stuff, which is pretty appealing, and has a more relaxed ability to be humorous. I found the cruise ship stuff just plain embarrassing.

i really loved 27th city but i made the mistake of reading how to be alone before the corrections and i think i read too much into how he translated a lot of the concerns and preoccupations in those essays into the novel. it made it feel v. heavy-handed esp the gary sections

off the top of my head:

Human Stain
Middlesex
On Beauty
What I Loved
Absurdistan
Netherland
Sure why not Kavalier and Clay

No love for Everything is Illuminated? It's been too long since I read it, but surprised not to see it mentioned. Loved Oscar Wao, but maybe a shade less than the above list.

i didnt know my name is red is post2000, i guess i would include that

u know reconsidering--name is red is good but not "great" in the way i want it to be--SNOW, by pamuk, however, is--really fantastic, touching book

good to hear, i got 'snow' for a dollar at a hospital book fair and hopefully i'll get to it soon.

No love for Everything is Illuminated? It's been too long since I read it, but surprised not to see it mentioned.

i really only liked 1/3rd of this book--the part narrated by Alex. The rest of it was a big mess.

i didnt put everything is illuminated on my list because i hate people who are more successful than me at an earlier age

haha! its also not a v. good book tho in fairness

everyone always wanted me to read this for some reason:

http://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:tVtuT9-ijUiI_M:http://www.sd68.k12.il.us/schools/orchard/lmc/pi.jpg

I enjoyed Life of Pi. I do think its strict declarations make it a better read for young adults, along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird or The Jungle. Good book.

i read life of pi and remember almost nothing about it

i pretty much hated it but maybe it's just cuz it came too highly recommended from other ppl

I'll come right out and admit it: I enjoyed House of Leaves

I was frustrated by the Reader's Digest mix-down of Oscar Wao, squeezed into the New Yorker--hopefully it left out a lot of crucial material, because what I read seemed like an elaborate stereotyping of the science fiction nerd, just basically/methodically milking the type and premise to death. But, although these are short stories and too old, I love Diaz'z Drown, Edward P. Jones's Lost In The City, Gaitskill's Because They Wanted To (she's uncanny, a genius of the age)

Well, I don't quite "love" Junot Diaz's Drown, but close enough (the other two, absolutely)

Also Daniel Coshnear's Jobs And Other Preoccupations--stories based on his working in group homes, gardening, ect, sort of post-Carver, insofar as got the grubby detail, poignant moments, but also jarring imagery x plot development=editing insight, which a lot of Carver wannabees fumble at best.

I would probably nominate "The Feast of the Goat" by Vargas Llosa. But that's quite possibly just because I am a huge Vargas Llosa stan and I think that's his best of the three he's published this decade.

OTM, and why I couldn't like Oscar Wao. Having read the Vargas Llosa a couple of weeks before the Diaz made the latter pale in comparison. Oscar Wao himself is so uninteresting, and the use of argot not very compelling. As a fictional recreation of the psychology gripping a populace ruled by a dictator, it's interesting and no more.

My list:

Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello
McEwan - Atonement
Robinson - Gilead
Ali - Brick Lane
McCarthy - The Road
Holinghurst - On Beauty

Also: if you can get a copy of Andrew Holleran's slim, mournful Grief, do so.

i couldn't finish Oscar Wao--I was so underwhelmed by it

My big fiction discovery this decade = Dawn Powell

My big fiction discovery this decade = William Gaddis

haha i tht you meant william trevor for a minute

Hm, I don't really have time to read much contemporary literature these days. I absolutely adore Ben Marcus' Notable American Women, though (released in 2002).

― emil.y, Tuesday, March 17, 2009 11:51 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

^ cosign cosign cosign

oscar wao has made it into tescos lately i noticed, with a new cover. and the week after i noticed that i saw it at least twice on the train. not london trains, either. provincial trains.

picking ten favorite novels of recent years feels a bit odd. 'favorite' as a qualification for me implies some kind of rating books for reasons beyond objective merit, i.e. those i have a special affection for or connection to - all the possible wordings feel imprecise - books which seem to have reached and affected you in some way beyond (again, a bad word) their context.

which feels a little odd with stuff this recent, in that having lived thro its context it is hard to see to the sides of it.

i mean i could come up with a list of 'ten novels i reckon are objectively pretty good' (they'd pretty much all have been mentioned already) but the marcus is the one i came into the thread to mention.

also, the fact that samuel delany had published a novel in 2007 had completely passed me by. ooh.

i seriously considered putting 'dark reflections' on my list. it's a little slight but i really liked it.

for me talking about books in the context of "favourite" is more interesting for the reason (i think) your talking about - it gives up the idea of some objective criterion and gets into all the strange and personal ways a reader lives a book ~~~ maybe because i dont really know anything but i love talking about a book as something lived and not fully knowable and hearing how other ppl struggled or tht their way through something is useful and often fun to me

i guess i think that "books which seem to have reached and affected you in some way beyond their contex" are exactly the sorts of books i want to read

Scanning through other people's lists has put me on a bit of a downer. The books that I know about don't seem interesting to me at all. I almost never read classic narrative fiction at all these days, and it'd take something very highly recommended for me to do so with contemporary literature. I want proper experimental fiction.

And no, having an unreliable or quirky narrator is not experimental. And no, I didn't like Heartbreaking Work, and I only really considered it experimental as a memoir, not much as a novel. Even then, meh. I did enjoy House of Leaves a lot, but I liked it as a fun horror story with cool typography, not really as a serious work. Notable American Women, following The Age of Wire and String (released in the 90s) is the only one I can think of that actually really did something different.

So, okay, in the name of not making this just a whiny and pointless post, can you guys recommend something that you think I might like based on this info?

btw thanks for this thread, dudes, i need some stuff to read on spring break

I need to re-read it, but I really really loved Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper.

― if you like it then you shoulda put a donk on it (bernard snowy), Wednesday, 18 March 2009 00:12 (Yesterday) Permalink

this book was horrible dude

I want proper experimental fiction.

maybe atmospheric disturbances??? its not experimental in an obv way but it works against a lot of expections really well and manages to bush boundaries esp re: unreliable narrators w/o having to do some gimmicky font size bs

then again, I don't really have much to contribute because I haven't read any books from the past 10 yrs worth mentioning

just read poetry xp

I'd definitely be among the consensus picks, which makes sense as it's probably their being acclaimed that got me to read them in the first place. A few thoughts:

Philip Roth - The Human Stain
Writing really doesn't get much better than this. I've enjoyed his others too, and although they seem a bit slight nest to this one, there's such a wealth of detail that I cannot fault him at all.

Ian McEwan - Atonement & Saturday
Loved Atonement, liked Saturday very much - until it comes to the endings, which he simply cannot do. Amsterdam's from the 2000s as well I think - it's rubbish.

Alan Hollinghurst - On Beauty
Exquisite. I didn't find it dull at all, it was almost a page-turner for me. It's a beautiful evocation of its era.

Jonathan Lethem - Fortress of Solitude
One that haunts me more with time. I like that Lethem gives the impression of taking all the lighter parts of pop culture very seriously, and that what he produces doesn't seem to take itself too seriously (except by being serious work, if that makes any sense!) I really enjoyed The Disappointment Artist too, it triggered lots of memories for me.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Yup.

Junot Diaz
Drown is wonderful, but must be mid 90s surely? Oscar Wao I was looking at today, but doesn't really appeal for some reason.

Sarah Waters - The Night Watch
Another one that's beautifully evocative, with lots of little insights and she can clearly write - but this just doesn't work, because it doesn't have much of a plot. Should be used in classes to emphasise how even the best writing means nothing without an exciting or at least interesting story.

Sebastian Faulks - On Green Dolphin Street
I absolutely loved this. I don't understand why he doesn't get proper acclaim, this is empathetic, astutely paced, and observes internal lives beautifully. Instead he has to console himself with his royalty cheques and his solid gold house.

Death and the Penguin wasn't really that great at all but it had a v heavy and odd texture

I would recommend looking at the cover and reading the first and last page maybe

oh emily i liked springer's progress too have you read that? its maybe closer to what you want

oscar wao has made it into tescos lately i noticed, with a new cover. and the week after i noticed that i saw it at least twice on the train. not london trains, either. provincial trains.

Hardcore snobbery ;-)

Feast of the Goat sounds interesting - I'm sure people have already seen this old piece on it to be found at the LRB archive. It mentions Reasons of State, which I just finished.

Just looked up Atmospheric Disturbances and Springer's Progress. They both sound kind of interesting, yeah. Not sure about the 'middle aged author and hot young girl' plot of Springer's Progress, but if done well I could easily get past that.

If the 'just read poetry' was directed at me, then, hmm. I've always been a prose person, and while I am getting a bit into poetry these days, it's mostly typographical stuff from the 60s or before, and not contemporary poetry. Though I probably will give one of my MA tutors' work a more full reading when he's no longer teaching me, as he does seem to be a pretty awesome poet.

Wittingstein's Mistress, after Notable American Women (and maybe Iain Sinclair's Downriver, i guess) is probably the most recent 'experimental' fiction I happened to have read. WM is way late 80s tho'.

ive heard good things about wittengstein's mistress but i havent read it. the only other novel i can think of is castle's anticipation and thats 80s as well

More experimental stuff I just thought about: I'm Off by Jean Echenoz (from '99 but English translation is 2001), and then there are other books by him.

oh, and Waiting Period by Hubert Selby Jr! That's great!

I would have to go with 'Human Stain' as well--for some reason I thought that came out in the '90s. And I really WANTED to like 'Oscar Wao', but the way it kept curving away from whatever story you most wanted to read and telling you about that character's mother or aunt or whatever infuriated me after a while. In the end I hadn't spent enough time with Oscar himself to care much what happened to him.

some ppl leaning toward experimental stuff seem to dig evan dara:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-easy-chain-by-evan-dara-review

fyi he reads a lot like gaddis so if that's not your bag...

i dont think its contempt - i certainly didnt mean my criticism that way like i sd i mostly think its misguided and v much blind to its own shortcomings. not sure why you think its too late to talk about the book either altho if yr sick of debating it fair cop

Lamp: I said 'too late' cos it was late at night where I am. and the lights in my apartment are not good. and I had been drinking all night, and shouldn't really have been online. It wasn't a comment about where we are in history. I am happy to discuss the book, I suppose.

picking ten favorite novels of recent years feels a bit odd. 'favorite' as a qualification for me implies some kind of rating books for reasons beyond objective merit, i.e. those i have a special affection for or connection to - all the possible wordings feel imprecise - books which seem to have reached and affected you in some way beyond (again, a bad word) their context.

which feels a little odd with stuff this recent, in that having lived thro its context it is hard to see to the sides of it.

I don't understand this objection at all. surely 'favourite' - though it *might* involve 'I think this is really good' - also allows something like 'I love this cos I read it on my holiday to Canada and I associate it with great vistas of snow out of the train window'. that sort of thing (which is 'context') could be very recent, as well as it could be quite long ago.

Lamp said something similar to the above, and I pretty much agree with it.

i was 14 when 2000 started and was just about to start enjoying books which weren't SF. this is kind of a factor.

nb i totally agree with post of lamp's upthread:

for me talking about books in the context of "favourite" is more interesting for the reason (i think) your talking about - it gives up the idea of some objective criterion and gets into all the strange and personal ways a reader lives a book ~~~ maybe because i dont really know anything but i love talking about a book as something lived and not fully knowable and hearing how other ppl struggled or tht their way through something is useful and often fun to me

i guess i think that "books which seem to have reached and affected you in some way beyond their contex" are exactly the sorts of books i want to read

― now broadcasting wen updates (Lamp), Thursday, March 19, 2009 9:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i just find that for me the last ten years' books are (for some reason) harder to find favorites in.

some books mentioned:

- i like that one person upthread likes the people of paper and one person hates it
- oscar wao actually kind of made me think 'no, maybe popular culture as a source of metaphor and/or community ISN'T the way to go', which was a weird thought, for me. n.b. my mention of being in tesco wasn't intended to be disparaging the proles for having bought it in tesco! i buy lots of things in tesco!
- has anyone read the sequel to death and the penguin?
- i should probably read some of the experimental novels ppl are talking about
- thankfully no one has mentioned 'only revolutions'
- i should probably read 'on beauty'. at the time i thought it seemed kind of a retrograde move from 'autograph man', the stomping on which by british newspaper-level criticism still confuses and annoys me
- everyone really, really should read 'notable american women'

wow evan dara sounds awesome--never heard of that guy

lots of ppl think dara is a psuedonym, possibly of vollmann but i dont really see it

which dara is the best to read first?

check out the lost scrapbook first id say

lots of names that come to mind have been mentioned already, but i'll mention 'bel canto'. looked forward to returning to it each day while i was reading it and i remember being quite taken with the beauty of some of the sentences and aptness of certain metaphors.

Hey, yeah, 'Bel Canto' was really good.

thirded

Never read The Autograph Man, but it sounded abysmal in the LRB, which I don't consider 'british newspaper-level criticism'.

Avoided 'On Beauty' because 'The Autograph Man' was unfinishably bad, plus I already love 'Howard's End' and couldn't see the point of a retread. Am now reconsidering in light of above comments.

I understand your doubts, James, but can at least assure you that it's radically, radically different from White Teeth; wouldn't be surprised if it's radically different from Autograph Man also. I kind of love Howards End myself, but don't think this book would ruin that one for anyone. It's just full of fine writing and insight in its own right.

I have literally stopped reading books since graduation. It's awful. :(

you graduated? Congratulations!

There's no doubt OB is also radically different from AM. I found AM enjoyable enough as pure entertainment, but it was a second division attempt at a kind of book Smith isn't really equipped to write. OB is hugely better, although not without its weaknesses (noteably a rather flabby sense of structure). I think Pinefox is also right, James, in suggesting that your fear of it spoiling Howards End is misplaced. The Howards End echoes are fairly subtle and I suspect many readers would have missed them entirely if Smith hadn't drawn attention to them herself.

am i alone in finding ZS's sentences in OB (only work of hers i've read)...clunky? sometimes almost...unnatural? i don't have the book handy for an example, unfortunately.

Human Stain, The Immigrants, 2666
and probably another unknown novel that wasnt translated (yet?!)

My big fiction discovery this decade = William Gaddis

― Mr. Que, Thursday, March 19, 2009 3:14 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

Me too! I've been trying to do 1 per year because they're so emotionally exhausting. I have Carpenter's Gothic for this year, and then I guess I'll start re-reading.

don't know whether you're alone, but I don't share your response: I think many many sentences in OB are very finely judged. (I don't think many sentences at all in WT are.)

OK, 'On Beauty' is on the list to get!

I don't think OB is a continuous stream of finely judged sentences (although as the pinefox says it has many). But if that kind of aesthetic polish were what mattered "The Master" by Colm Toibin or "The Sea" by John Banville, perhaps "Mothers Milk" By Edward St Aubyn - I could no doubt come up with some others if I worked my memory a bit harder - would be on my list. It's not that I'm indifferent to a consistent beauty of style - Hollinghurst is in my list partly for that reason - but in the final analysis other things matter more.

Well, beauty in prose is an odd thing, hard to define, and maybe hard to separate from a sense of cognition. Hollinghurst's book is beautifully written, but that's not to say it's all purple prose - rather it's full of fine judgements, perceptions rendered with great precision and concision - and that seems to be part of what I find beautiful about it. OB does share that quality of perception and emotional nuance with TLB, though it doesn't really go in for fine descriptive writing so much.

I loathe Banville and hope I never have to read that last book of his.

god, i loathe him too and i've only read two half-books. i found his prose v ugly, actually.

I loathe Banville too (& was v scathing about him here when The Sea won the Booker). I do think he writes beautifully controlled sentences. My point was that that isn't enough - they don't compensate for the pretentious awfulness of his dreary books.

I like his sentences too but the two novels I've read have never thrilled me.

It's great that three of us hate the odious Banville so much !

Banville scandal: he wrote the introduction to one of the Penguin Simenon Maigret reprints a few years ago, but in a more recent introduction to a Simenon book for an American publisher, he talks about how he has never finished a Maigret book.

Ha, I thought I was going to like Christine Falls by one Benjamin Black but just could not get into it at all let alone finish it and then I discovered it was really by Banville so I was off the hook.

Good! More justice meted out to bad Banville!

i dislike banville generally but the book of evidence was a great, i have to admit.

Kepler was great too. Upon that rock I stand.

- Banville Holdouts Resistance Group

reading a lot of short fiction l8ly its weird feelin like theres been a "comeback" in terms of critical appreciation for plainly told "moment of clarity" stories this decade iirc werent we supposed to be reading mostly short fiction abt robot ghosts or cyborg detectives or smthn ca. 2004 w/e happened to that i wonder

mb its just necessary to find a way to present to us so clearly and sharply and unadorned the ways in which we make ourselves unhappy

Off the top of my head, I'd include these:

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira
2666, Roberto Bolano
The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas

― wmlynch, Tuesday, March 17, 2009 5:50 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark

oh whoa, I wonder if this thread is where I first heard about Bartleby & Co.? great book, at any rate. the story about Salinger was pretty great/hilarious. I haven't read the whole thing straight through yet, though; just been dipping into it at random, like I do with Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (which it reminds me a little of, and which I think the narrator actually mentions reading at one point (maybe even talks about doing so by opening it to random passages??))

haven't read Austerlitz or Melancholy yet, but what Sebald I've read is obviously great, and the other Laszlo Krasznahorkai I just started on, War and War, seems really intriguing/promising.

so I am glad

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n27/n137756.jpg
she got pretty bad after this tho

loooool sorry it came out in 1995 decades blow by so fast these days

surprised this hasnt been mentioned

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/Never_Let_Me_Go.jpg

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Any appetite for a proper write-in end-of-decade poll? I may even do the honours myself if people are into it.

i was wondering the same myself actually. although i seem to have only read 3.6 new books this decade

city of tiny lights

but then, i'm me.

you should sign off all your posts that way

looks like it's just me & you, thomp

I don't read contemporary fiction very often because i'm so behind on the old stuff my interest in current stuff is competing with my interest in fucking ages of over stuff.

other even

I vaguely remember liking Walter Mosley's The Man In My Basement

I'd love to see a post-2000 poll. Can't say I've read more than 15 or so new books this decade though.

I'd say yes to a poll!

Right, I'm going to give it a shot. I'll get a nominations thread up later today.

Two thoughts before I start:
- nominations will be curtailed to keep the list manageable; and
- I'm going to make it a 'best books' poll, not just 'best novels' - so you'll be able to vote for Jordan's autobiography after all.

In the meantime, start racking those brains!

One more thing: should I put it here or on ILE? I don't want it to be lost, and I'm never sure how many people ever read I Love Books.

I loved these recently published ones:

Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
William Trevor - Love and Summer

Here's the nominations thread - have at it!

i have just bought my father a copy of this 'city of tiny lights' book.

but then, he's him.