ILX BOOK OF THE 00s: VOTING, lobbying and boostering thread (voting closes 11 January) - all welcome, please join in!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090422/af-south-africa-election/images/c359edad-c014-41cc-9bbc-c56abcece6c8.jpg

The nominations are here

1. Your Ballot

You may vote for up to twenty books. You get a total of up to 231 votes to allocate. There are two ways of allocating them:
- Ordered ballot: rank them 1-20 (or 1-however-may-you've-selected). The #1 gets 40 votes, the #2 gets 30 votes, the #3 gets 24, then it goes 20, 16, 13, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, and 3 each for #19 and #20.
- Unordered ballot: you still have to pick a #1. It gets 22 votes. All the others get 11.

If you can't stretch to twenty books, vote anyway! The ordered list is heavily top-weighted, so if you can only stretch to six or seven books, you'll still get to allocate two-thirds of your 231 votes.

2. How to vote

Put your ballot in an email, making it clear what your #1 is and whether the list is ordered or unordered. Include your username (or an alias) for the purposes below. Title your email something like 'ILX books of the 00s'. Then send it to:

ismaelklata (at) googlemail (dot) com

This is a new account that I've just set up. It seems to be working fine, but in case there's any problems I will acknowledge all ballots either here or by return. If you don't get a reply, post here and I'll get back to you. Do not post your ballot here.

The final order will be determined by the following criteria:
a. total votes received
b. number of #1s received
c. number of ballots featured on
d. earliest #1 received
e. earliest vote received
So there's a small incentive to vote early. You have the rest of the decade to vote - voting closes 31 December (Aleutian time).

3. Blurbs

I'm going to be quite firm about this. I want to make the final rundown as good a resource as I can, basically so I can use it as a reading list myself for the next few years, so I am going to insist that you include recommendations for, say, three of the books you vote for. I will include them in the final chart, with due acknowledgements. I'm not insisting on much - a single sentence "I liked [title] because..." will be fine - but I'd like everyone to contribute.

4. Horse trading

Campaigning is an important part of the voting process, so use this thread for it. But I want to keep it fairly limited lest we make the final order too obvious, so here's the rules:
- you may lobby for one book
- you can go as over-the-top as you like for your book
- but once a book has a lobbyist, nobody else can lobby for it
- however, you can discuss it and ask questions, so long as you keep it relatively subdued and don't cross the line into lobbying yourself.

The Human Stain is reserved, I believe, but everything else is up for grabs.

5. Now get stuck in!

is this where i get to say

John Gray - Straw Dogs (2002) - WTF!

I nominated that! I don't plan to lobby for it, but man if we're just wtf-ing at books in the nom list there are plenty that leap out at me before Straw Dogs.

Don't hold back, fellows.

One thing I sort of forgot - I don't suppose it needs clarified, but for the benefit of our slower contributors: YOU MAY ONLY VOTE FOR THINGS WHICH ARE ON THE NOMINATIONS LIST.

xp i suppose it will be interesting to see if it gets any support but it seems far too daily mail for ilx's liberal sensibilities.

Its total gloom & pessimism about humanity may pick up a few votes. I mean yes it's not liberal, but I don't think that makes it Mail-y (Gray argues that trad-values-based conservatism is as fucked as everything else iirc).

There was some back-and-forth about it on the most recent What Are You Reading thread.

Thanks. frankiemachine nailed it pretty well there, it's the argument style - or lack of - as much as the content that riled me. but anyway, enough anti-lobbying.

Been meaning to read Straw Dogs a go for a while, maybe I'll give it a whirl over Christmas.

I've received the first ballot and passed it to my team of gollums for processing. Pleasingly, a book I absolutely hated is the early frontrunner.

Wanna finish Perdido Street Station before I submit. Should be easy enough over xmas.

Nominitpick: D F Wallace's Oblivion belongs under "short stories".

Nominitpick: Charles Burns - Black Hole (2005) belongs under "Graphic Novels".

Sorted. I bumped Straw Dogs into politics while I was at it, in light of the above.

Another nominitpick: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion should be memoir/autobiography, not pop sci.

Some good-looking stuff on the noms list. I'll probably try to read a bit more of the poetry before voting, maybe one or two of the others (that Spinoza book is tempting) if I get to a library before Christmas.

Consider the Lobster should probably be in culture rather Fiction, since it's like non-fiction essays about lobsters and porn and such.

Oh man. Serves me right for having categories.

To add to the nominitpicking (I feel guilty for having caused you to create the category, burdening you with more work), I believe the following are all short story collections:

T.C. Boyle – Tooth & Claw (2006)
Miranda July - No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007)
Alice Munro - Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (2001)
Alice Munro – Runaway (2005)
Kevin Moffett - Permanent Visitors (2006)
George Saunders - Pastoralia (2000)
George Saunders - The Brief And Frightening Reign Of Phil / In Persuasion Nation (2006) (<-well, the former is a novella, the latter short stories)

So is John Grey more Emile Cioran (as essayist), or Lewis Mumford/Kirkpatrick Sale? I'm intrigued.

Incidentally, I've managed to read only 22 of the titles in the nominated list, and have another 6 judging me disapprovingly from my shelves... Its perhaps optimistic to expect anyone outside of bedridden New Yorker/Science/Economist subscribers to have anything like an overarching view of what's really happened in literary culture.

Derelict: literary prowess apart, I fear you may be describing a disconcertingly large proportion of the ILX demographic there.

dg: no problem, it's actually relatively easy to shuffle the odd entry around - compiling the thing in the first place was the backbreaking part.

I know few of you will ever read the Satyajit Das book Traders, Guns and Money, but its notable for 1) describing to outsiders what a mess derivatives were, 2) coming out in 2006, a year before the MBS/CDS markets collapsed, and 2 years before the global stock market collapse, and 3) being funny as hell. Scan editorials for the author's name, as they're always entertaining reads.

‘The sexier side of finance ... at last’ Corporate Financier
‘a page turning quality more reminiscent of a John Grisham novel’ FINASIA
‘....more riveting than the Da Vinci Code...in the mould of Liars' Poker’ Goola Warden, The Edge
‘this is possibly the best insider account of a career in investments since Michael Lewis's book Liar's Poker’www.dna.bloggingstocks.com
‘... a scalpel of a book’ Financial Engineering News

His latest pronouncement: "The best way to look at it is that we'll be living in a capitalist economy with Chinese characteristics, certainly for most of next year and maybe 2011," Mr. Das says from his home base in Sydney, Australia. "But you can only defy gravity for so long. That's as long as you've got jet fuel. A jumbo jet out of fuel is not a pretty sight."

^v good lobbying - makes me want to read it

I will look around for that - am interested in books on the crisis - I think I'm sort of waiting for John Lanchester's book on it (called Whoops, I think), since I've enjoyed his LRB articles explaining things to me.

I will try and answer your question on Gray. A bit of both, but more establishment (Oxford don, government advisory). Must leave work though.

Someone on the other thread was looking for books about the financial crisis - that sounds like a good 'un. Pretty impressive to have got it out before the ship went down.

More nitpicking: Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem is short stories. I was going to say something about the filing of A Secular Age under "Popular Science" but I guess it makes as much sense there as anywhere else.

I'm feeling pretty good about myself that I've read 19 of these.

I struggled a bit with The Disappointment Artist too, and it was my nomination! It could've been under culture, short stories or autobiography, depending on mood. These categories create more problems than they solve.

Sounds like you need a quickfire twentieth to round out your ballot. I've heard Straw Dogs is pretty good.

Das is not unique in identifying the OTC derivatives issues (plenty of people were screaming from rooftops if one looked beyond mainstream broadcasts). Only in providing a humorous look at the insides of investment banks as math/physics PhD quantitative finance geeks were being promoted over trader jocks and overseen by clueless managers. If I had to recommend a single good book about the crisis it would be Zuckerman's The Greatest Trade Ever, about John Paulson, the hedge manager who personally made almost $6 billion in 2007/2008 by shorting mortgage backed securities.

Sounds like you need a quickfire twentieth to round out your ballot. I've heard Straw Dogs is pretty good.

I have it on my Christmas wishlist, so if I get it, I guess that will be a sign that I need to read it before the 31st.

Suddenly thought I should have nominated a Robert Irwin novel, then realised he hasn't written any this decade. Shame.

I will try and answer your question on Gray. A bit of both, but more establishment (Oxford don, government advisory).

So to clarify this, he aims for Cioran condition-of-humanity pessimism, especially in Straw Dogs, but many of his more concrete positions & arguments fit with one green viewpoint (disclaimer: I know jack about the shades of green thought) - skeptical of progress, man just another animal, reason has limits, The Enlightenment isn't a simple good. But his roots are in classic (and Oxbridgey) political philosophy traditions - Hobbes, Mill, Oakeshott, Berlin. Writers with a touch of mardy modernism like him - Ballard, Banville, Will Self.

Only just noticed: David Thomson's The Whole Equation has been misfiled under popular science. It's actually a history of Hollywood. (The title is a quote from Fitzgerald's Last Tycoon.)

Haha rumbled - must confess I got lazy towards the end and started guessing. Will fix. I can't claim I misread it as 'popular scientology' or anything.

The ballots are literally starting to trickle in now. No shape to the voting whatsoever as yet, so you can still make all the difference!

What is interesting, to me at least - there were a very few books that I thought might scoop the ultimate prize, but I've only just received the first vote for any of them. There is also one book that has featured on every ballot so far, and it absolutely isn't one that I'd've predicted.

My copy of the Book of Disquiet has copyright dates of 1991 and 1998. What qualifies it for this list? Just curious.

I voted. Thanks for doing this.

Ballot sent, blurbs for my top 10 forthcoming soon.

My dad told me a bunch of authors that I think he knows he likes (or has liked in the past): jeffrey deaver, john cook, john sanford, ken follett, john kellerman, john buchan, anthony horowitz, james patterson, john grisham, tom clancy, clive cussler, and dean koontz. Could any of you recommend any of the books from this ILX list that might be similar?

Ballots received, thanks guys. I think you've finally taken us beyond an x-way tie on 40 points for the leader, so that's Target One achieved.

wmlynch: I've become aware that there's a couple of errors in there. I'm duly gutted, but it's too late to kick them out. I'll have to find another solution for them, maybe have a couple of half-places for the renegades.

CaptainLorax: there isn't very much like that on the list - it's unfortunate and I remarked on it at the time, but no-one here likes that stuff enough to put it up. You could try George Pelecanos, I've quite enjoyed the one or two things of his that I've dipped into. Otherwise, anything with the title in embossed silver type should do the trick.

Thank you

Ah, it appears that the earlier English translation of the Pessoa was incomplete and a (more) complete one appeared in 2001. Thanks for putting this together.

gonna try and knock out either Marilynn Robinson's Home or Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke over xmas before i vote. anyone recommendations on which one???

nm it was Gilead that was nominated, not Home. so Tree of Smoke it is!

Well, I was up sick almost the whole night and am lying in my bed, very miserable. Why not cheer Ismael up by sending him your ballot today? Only nine days to go!

I've just counted up the books I've read on the nominations list and was quite pleased that I'd managed 25 given that the majority of the books I read, particularly fiction, tend to be published before 2000. I wondered how this would compare to other contributors and I see that it compares favourably to those who have commented - so far 19 and 20 I think. I wonder though if I am at 32 years older than those contributors and therefore have had more time to read those books. If you are 22 years old now, for example, you would have started the decade at 12 years old and would not have been reading the books on this list. I'd be interested to learn the ages of other contributors, and the number of books they've read on this list.

44, plus a very few abandonments. I actually thought I might've done a bit better than that - I read mostly modern fiction and was getting through 30-40 a year before tailing off a bit recently. I'm 33 by the way.

i've read ~39 or so...i'm 30 yrs old

Well, I feel humbled by your 44. I like to think I make up for it with books published pre-2000 but in reality the gap probably widens a bit more. I'll need to make some cuts to my work and private life to catch up!

I'm compiling my voting intentions right now. The first two are easy for me as they pick themselves really. Then 3 to 10 is pretty straight forward but it's tricky to know which order to put them in as they are all very close. I would probably put them in a different order if I repeated the exercise tomorrow or next week. Also, I think some books I read say 8 years ago suffer because I can't remember them as well as more recent books. For example, some of Gladwell's books will appear on my list but the more recent his publications the higher up they will be. I wonder if part of the reason for this is that the more recent book sticks in my mind more clearly than his earlier ones. It's also tricky comparing a great popular science book against a great work of fiction. It's difficult to find reasons to distinguish them in the rankings. I suppose at the end of the day you have to go with your gut feeling about it.

Oh, another observation on categories. I thought that the Plotz "Good Book" might be better in the history section than in the "Culture and Sport" section. Much of the Old Testament is admittedly not historical fact but some of it is or at least reflects historilogical facts. And in many ways the book takes a look at Jewish history through the prism of the Jewish bible.

Who is lobbying for Roth's "Human Stain"? I was looking forward to reading the lobbying for it and commenting if appropriate. It would be a crying shame if it was not discussed prior to voting closing.

I have ... just forgotten how many as I came to post it. 50-something. 69 if you count stuff I didn't finish. I am 24.

This is going to make voting harder than I thought. Didn't I nominate Javier Mariaz?

thomp, that's an amazing number. Is that 50-odd (or 69) of the books on the nomination list for this competition? Or do you mean 50-odd (or 69) books published since 2000 (including ones which did not make this shortlist)?

also, i do hope everyone who has read it voted for notable american women

don't worry it's cool i'll be providing blurbs explaining why i gave up on each of the top 100 entries i gave up on, inc. notable american women

I was planning to get cracking straightaway on Tuesday, if I can - I thought I'd have an empty week after Monday, though there's a chance I could be snowed. There are a few film & music polls coming up too, I'd like to avoid the competition.

Will you be around? Don't worry about the blurbs, I've got a lot of good ones by now - but I do want your contributions, your well-readité would be most useful.

Other books that I'd have nominated that are worth a gander

Thomas Wharton - Salamander
Wonderful book about the quest to create the perfect book. Picaresque travelling from location to lcoation across the world, beginning with the fall of Quebec and ending up everywhere. Includes a castle in Croatia with moving walls and bookshelves that travel the hallways, and stories inside stories inside stories
He also wrote The Logogryph, which is a more abstract and stranger meditation on the same sort of issues, which I haven't gotten to yet, but is supposedly quite something.

Edward Carey - Observatory Mansions
Bunch of strange and isolated individuals living in a boarding house, whose lives slowly become exposed to change. Um. It's really hard to explain how great this is...it's a tonal masterpiece - Carey manages to very uniquely capture the voices of his eccentrics. A claustrophobic story, and a claustrophobic read, but a very good one.

Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai
Words can't do this justice. A single mother and her 5 year old genius son living in London, travelling on the circle line while he reads the Illiad in Greek and the Kalilah wa Dimnah in Arabic, with well-meaning bystanders offering her advice. She slept with his father because there was no polite way to end the conversation, informing the reader of this fact while Ludo interrupts her with the naming of increasingly multi-legged octopus (NONAPUS, DEKAPUS, etc. etc.). To provide him with strong male role models, they watch Kurosawa's Seven Samurai over and over. The first part is Sybilla, depressive and rational to a fault and darkly hilarious. The second is Ludo (Steven? David?) on a quest for his (or possibly just a) father, exposing us to increasingly strange and fascinating potential candidates, and endless iterations of the same conversation. Multilingual, hilarious, pedantic, perfect. I have done an awful job of saying what the book is ABOUT, but it's been too long since I've read it to try and have a go at it.

Ismael, I did indeed do all of those dives. Has anyone else on this board done them? The drift dive between El Bells and the Blue Hole was my favourite. You start from the rocky cliffs leading onto a small pool and you descend directly down into a long and narrow crack on the rock shelf which is just under the water line. You go straight down for about 18 metres and through some arches. Then you follow the massive coral wall all the way along to the Blue Hole - it takes about 30-40 minutes to do this part and it is lovely. You have the vast blue Red Sea on your left shoulder and the massive coral wall on your right shoulder. The part of the coral wall you can see at any one time is as tall as a large building in London and there is much beneath that you can't see as it goes down so far. It's like swimming along the side of the buildings on the Strand until you get to Trafalgar Square except the underwater buildings have beautiful coral all over them, and sword fish, eels, lion fish etc all swimming alongside you and feeding in the coral. There are literally hundreds of thousands of goldfish around you on the dive. You end up at a part of the Wall that allows you entry into the Blue hole. We swam upwards over the coral Wall and entered the Blue Hole at a depth of 7 metres. Those who have lots of experience and are qualified to a very deep level can enter the Blue Hole by descendng to about 52 metres and swimming 26 metres along a narrow tunnel into the Blue Hole, entering at about 62 metres. Below 30 metres one begins to suffer from nitrogen narcosis - the effect is like drunkeness. Many Russian divers dive outwith their experience and qualifications and a large number have unfortunately died. When sufficiently narced one can thrown away one's oxygen supply and buouyancy jacket and laugh hysterically. it never ends well though. Here is a link to the Blue Hole entry on wikipedia where there are some lovely photos of the dive - the Sinai Dive Guide is obviously much better. If I had a scanner I would post some of them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Hole_(Red_Sea)

Blue Hole seen from above. The area towards the sea is not "The Arch" but a shallow bank called "The Saddle".

File:BlueHole Rohscan bearb 150d.jpg
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Alex: thanks. A couple of other folk have been kind enough to send me recommendations for things that missed the nominations list. I'm going to sprinkle the countdown with these bonus entries, time permitting.

http://www.bigbluedahab.com/index_files/Bluehole.jpg

Red, you can post the image direct if you put (img) and (/img) tags, but with square brackets instead of round ones, round the image address. See the 'Show Formatting Help' link at the bottom of this page, under the 'Submit Post' button.

Is that an image from the Sinai Diving Guide? I'm not sure I follow it - do you start by descending to 32m and then sort of corkscrewing across and up out of The Blue Hole? What is The Blue Hole anyway, is it like an underwater chimney? I must confess I don't see the attraction of something that dangerous - I've only dived/dove once, in calm water to about six metres, and it really hurt my ears. We saw a cool massive turtle though.

I'm going to submit a ballot, and it'll be in in time.

^ a good person

^an English major.

^ a proper english major would casually submit it thirty minutes late.

also ismael, i will write you that extra blurb and get it to you in the next day or two, but this last week was a real disaster for doing productive things so it just hasn't happened yet. i will probably have time to do a couple others too if you need/want it. i'm really looking forward to the results although i suspect that they're going to be pretty random.

To back that up - I think only one book so far has picked up more than one #1 vote (possibly even less than you'd expect from a random distribution). The results will inevitably look a bit random when everyone has a different favourite book.

Disaster - I've just counted the votes and there are only two points in it between first and second. The bad news is that I voted for one of them. I want a comprehensive victory, not a cliffhanger - I don't want to feel like the guy who clinched it/didn't do enough.

You see my problem here, right?

not really, tbh

I can submit my ballot today still, right? I'll do so this afternoon, I promise!

Indeed you can. Voting closes at midnight today, your time.

A couple of people have pointed out that I need to clarify the rules. Sorry for making it look more complicated than it is. Here's what to do:

1. look at the nominations list
2. pick your favourites - you can vote for up to twenty
3. mark your #1
4. indicate whether you want the rest of your list to be ordered or unordered (ordered scores graduated points from 40 down to 3; in an unordered list everything scores 11, with your #1 scoring double)
5. email your ballot to ismaelklata (at) googlemail (dot) com

Thanks!

Do my choices have to be from that list?

They do - we ran the nominations thread back at the start of December. You can write a piece on a different book and I'll include it as a bonus (a few people have done this), but it won't score any points.

I am extraordinarily ill-read in the 00s, it seems.

Anyway, I'm sending a ballot of 10, almost all sci fi & fantasy.

My nom that would have perhaps been my no 1, had I bothered to nominate, is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I may attempt a bonus blurb if I get time.

Also, I second whoever it was above who said Iron Council should have been on the list rather than the other two Bas-Lag Mieville novels. It's so good.

Even tighter at the top today than we were last night - 7 points covering the top three now.

Is it okay if I just send my ballot without blurbs in the end? If my picks get in I'll definitely comment on them within thread, but I think I've been too ambitious in attempting to write full critical reviews, and I'm not happy with anything I've written so far.

Scuba diving, followed closely by porn studies and human cadavers

O man I have totally fallen for this Ismael/Redray sock diving guide publicity scam.

Golly, I feel like the villainous fairground operator who is unmasked at the end of each episode of Scooby Doo...

I don't know why I even feigned interest - I'm never diving again after my 6m near-death experience. The royalty from this book won't even nearly make up for it.

emil.y: of course you may submit without blurbs. I've got lots now. One or two chaps made a huge effort - I'm sure they'd be honoured to have you freeloading on their coattails.

Okay, sent.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y126/paradorlounge/9780330452236-01.jpg

10. Don DeLillo - Falling Man
(no votes, no points)

Virginia Plain: Jun 1, 2007
"I'm almost through with Delillo's Falling Man--it's much better than I thought it would be."

jaymc: May 8, 2008
"I liked Falling Man better than the last two, but that ain't saying much."

9. Henry Kissinger - Does America Need A Foreign Policy? (2001)
(no votes, no points)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Henry_and_Nancy_Kissinger.jpg/180px-Henry_and_Nancy_Kissinger.jpg

I wouldn't invite either over for dinner. I'd rather grudgingly have a drink with Kissinger though. He had some tiny amount of charm.
― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Wednesday, February 25, 2004 7:10 AM (5 years ago)

If I had one bullet and couldn't line them both up together, Kissinger just about gets the nod because he liked football was the monkey, not the organ grinder.
― Dave B (daveb), Wednesday, February 25, 2004 10:30 AM (5 years ago)

As for the question Kissinger was way funnier and inspired Dr. Strangelove. But he's still the evillest.
― Sym (shmuel), Wednesday, February 25, 2004 7:59 AM (5 years ago)

The surprising thing about that one is that the answer is 'No'.

8. Martin Amis - Yellow Dog (2003)
(no points, no votes)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HZc7gUUMY0c/R0UP4X4YJ-I/AAAAAAAAAlg/B367xiys9iU/s400/dr_martin_amis.jpg

I have started reading Yellow Dog by Martin Amis. At first I thought it was absolutely appalling, just so inaccurately observed & clumsy & showily pompous. Then I started wondering what I'd make of this if it were by no-one in particular and I thought well dammit there's a good bit of life there and british fiction could do with more stupid caricatures and ott sentences. I'm now about 60pp in and enjoying it. It's not like actual lols, but it rolls along entertainingly. Been a while since I read any Amis (my teen fave) fiction - maybe I've been missing it.

one of Amis's weaknesses is that he isn't content to be a good writer, he wants to be profound; the drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny, either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help). This ache for gravitas has led to much of Amis's weaker work: Time's Arrow and his writing on nuclear war (it's horrible, isn't it?).

So, so OTM from Fischer. I was trying to put my finger on it while reading Yellow Dog, but ended up on the parallel problem: he wants to be Bellow or Roth or Updike or some humane giant, but he's absolutely not equipped to be. I think he'd also like to have fled a tyrannical regime at some point.

― Parenthetic hound (woofwoofwoof), Tuesday, December 22, 2009 10:43 AM (2 weeks ago)

To wrap up the voting, this is just a dry run to get the format right. These are some of the books that won't be troubling our final countdown.

7. Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
(no points, no votes)

http://bluespriite.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/book-cover_bb.jpg

Not that it really matters, but if they had been nominated (or if I had actually bothered to nominate something) I would have voted for these as well as the few that I did vote for:
...
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
...
and probably some others...
― Home Taping Is Killing Muzak (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Friday, January 8, 2010 9:54 AM (3 days ago)

I was surprised nobody nominated the Bryson one. I've read one or two of his non-travel books, and they've been excellent.
― Ismael Klata, Friday, January 8, 2010 3:48 PM (3 days ago)

I remember not caring for it very much, but I don't remember specifically why.
― girl moves (Abbott), Friday, January 8, 2010 5:56 PM (3 days ago)

6. Oracle Night - Paul Auster
(no points, no votes)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rg7l1SsAh0Q/So0sWoEjRxI/AAAAAAAABP0/TlnFt1i9vZs/s200/Paul+Auster+-+Oracle+Night.jpg

I haven't read his latest, but the one before, Oracle Nights, was poor. Tired sloppy writing ridden with cliché, stereotypes rather than chartacters, unfunny wisecracks, lumpy plot, yet another outing for lone, existential NY writer protagonist-cum-alter ego etc etc. (and yet I guess ultimately readable, since I did finish it).
― Revivalist (Revivalist), Wednesday, October 11, 2006 10:17 AM (3 years ago)

I loved "The Music of Chance", I also read "Oracle Night" tho which I thought was pretty crap.
― Ronan (Ronan), Wednesday, November 8, 2006 6:34 PM (3 years ago)

James Wood rips Auster another one:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/30/091130crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all
I always thought I didn't have much time for Wood as a critic but I have to say I agree absolutely with him here. Auster gets away with murder.
― Zelda Zonk, Wednesday, November 25, 2009 3:50 PM (1 month ago)

5. John Lennon - Philip Norman (2009)
(no points, no votes)

http://img.skysports.com/08/01/218x298/Aaron_Lennon_629622.jpg

So, is the forthcoming Philip Norman book the "lives of John Lennon it's ok to discuss now"?
― Mark G, Wednesday, October 15, 2008 2:12 PM (1 year ago)

Solid and comprehensive bio, readable enough, but I doubt anyone would consider it literature. I was long ago forced to accept that Lennon, a childhood hero for me, was not a particularly nice man. All the same, some of this tarnished my opinion of him still further, which made it a mildly depressing read.
― frankiemachine, Wednesday, January 14, 2009 6:52 PM (11 months ago) Bookmark

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Steig Larsson (2008)
(no points, no votes)

http://leisurelylady.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo.jpg

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? (I read that one actually, it was decent but kinda weird. Like two separate books ... a corporate techno-thriller with a Silence of the Lambs grisly detective story sandwiched in the middle.)
― dmr, Saturday, January 9, 2010 6:17 PM (2 days ago)

Have twice tried to start "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," but both times glazed over after only a few pages. Is there a point at which it gets better?
― Hey Jude, Tuesday, October 27, 2009 7:03 PM (2 months ago)

Daar kun je eventueel nog Millennium Part 1 voorzetten, naar de detectivereeks waarop dit gebaseerd is. In Amerika heet de film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, deze professioneel hacker gespeeld door Noomi Rapace is inderdaad wel het meest opvallend aan de film. Eerst nog even zeiken, de meid wordt geintroduceerd als stoere lesbo, maar later krijgt ze dan alsnog wat met het andere hoofdpersonage gespeeld door Michael Nyqvist.
― Ludo, Monday, November 9, 2009 8:17 AM (2 months ago)

3. London A to Z (2001 edition)
(no points, no votes)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511BCYYAFML._SL500_AA240_.jpg

I'm not kidding when I say that I've probably got more out of reading this book than any other.

2. Ravelstein - Saul Bellow
(no points, no votes)

http://fglaysher.com/Reviews/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/ravelstein3-96x150.jpg

I think Ravelstein is a great place to start. Straightforward, clear and pretty concise, but wonderful nonetheless.
― M Carty (mj_c), Monday, September 8, 2003 10:12 AM (6 years ago)

1. Sinai Diving Guide - Alberto Siliotti (2005)
(231 points, 1 vote)

http://www.duikboeken.nl/contents/media/t_alberto_siliotti_sinai_diving_guide.jpg

O man I have totally fallen for this Ismael/Redray sock diving guide publicity scam.
― Parenthetic hound (woofwoofwoof), Monday, January 11, 2010 4:37 PM (5 hours ago)

Okay, I think I've got it now. To bed I go. Voting closes at midnight your time - since I can't tell what that is, I'll leave it open until the whole planet has passed into Tuesday. All votes welcome!

In case we do have any last-minute entrants, here are the rules:

1. look at the nominations list
2. pick your favourites - you can vote for up to twenty
3. mark your #1
4. indicate whether you want the rest of your list to be ordered or unordered (ordered are ranked on a set scale from 40 down to 3; in an unordered list everything scores 11, with your #1 scoring double)
5. email your ballot to ismaelklata (at) googlemail (dot) com

Haha! I can't believe my 'comment' (re: Bill Bryson) merits a blurb.

That fake rundown made me laugh pretty hard.

My ballot has been sent.

Voting is now closed - I'll get counting & verifying later today. I've picked a bad week to get busy, so while I'd like to start the countdown tonight it might have to wait a day or two to get the results thread up.

Thanks to all the (I think) 39 of you who voted!

I look forward to the coronation of the Sinai Diving Guide in due course.