Screened out

If one fact sums up the strange cultural shifts of the Noughties, it is this: if you Google the word ‘book’, the first result you get is ‘Facebook’.

Reel stinkers

Ah, here’s the sort of Noughties list we can all have fun with; the worst movies of the decade. It was the Indiana Jones comeback, unwieldy title and all, that did it for me; it represented the worst sin that a sequel can commit, tainting the original.

And in a similar vein, The Guardian asks for our worst books of the decade; “It's also hard to avoid mentioning Dan Brown,” says Sam Jordison, and that’s enough for me.

Order, order

In The Guardian, Marina Hyde weighs in the whole Noughties list thing. Although that’s not enough to stop her own paper from identifying the 50 books that defined the decade. How many have you read?

And with regards to the raw material of books, Countdown’s very own Susie Dent asks for our words of the decade.

One f***ing thing after another

Back to those lists, I’m afraid: Stuart Evers suggests 50 books of the Noughties; Skylar Jordan does the songs; Liz Frost’s favoured beauty products; and from Car magazine, the weirdest vehicles.

At least Q magazine does things a little differently. For a start, it avoids the awkwardness that many still feel about the word ‘Noughties’ by claiming that it’s offering up lists of the Artists and Albums ‘of the Century’. Which is accurate as far as it goes, but only postpones the agony for another 10 years, at which point presumably they’ll have to make a call on ‘Teens’ versus ‘Tens’.

Moreover, they get a bit Zeitgeisty by presenting the Top 100 not as a poll, but as the individual choices of ‘noted folk’, which is really a euphemism for ‘celebrities’. So we discover that KT Tunstall likes the Flaming Lips and Dizzee Rascal favours Young Jeezy, which is fair enough; but do we really need to know the choon preferences of Stringer Bell, the Master or Spongebob Squarepants? OK, I’ll give them the last one. He likes Oasis, by the way. Bless.

PS: Paul Morley doesn’t like those lists. Or does he?

Turn up the volumes (part 2)

The Times, not to be outdone, offers its own books of the Noughties, and inevitably there’s plenty of overlap with the Telegraph’s list. Oddly, though, this selection is defined as the ‘best’ of the decade; which, since it includes the likes of Twilight and The Da Vinci Code (which also tops the ‘worst’ list), this really raises more questions than it answers.

Turn up the volumes

The book was one of the few media formats that ended the Noughties in much the same shape as it began (although the increasing popularity of e-books of various flavours suggest that the next decade will tell another story). In the Telegraph, Brian MacArthur offer up 100 titles that define the Noughties.

I will try to prefix you

The French writer Camille de Toledo endeavours to sum up the Noughties in his intriguing tome Coming of Age at the End of History (translated by Blake Ferris):

...But reality had lost the ability to examine itself through anything more significant than a prefix. The dominant spirit of the present has banished the image of cyclical time, of revolutionary time, and it now only dreams of a future covered in endless shades of gray. Instead of the radically new, all we’ve got is the cycle of fashion, seasonal novelty. A universe of tiny little variations on the same thing, just with more beats, more bass notes and more nothingness. The novelty item! That’s why we keep going back to music stores, to newsstands, to supermarkets and to bookstores. Post, post, post, after, after, after, new, new, new, neo, neo, neo. The whole bundle of prefixes is repeated with the incantatory passion of a high priestess in heat. Maybe sometimes with good intentions, but IN VAIN!

Good as far as it goes... except, when did you last set foot in a music store?

Remembrance of decades past

Frantically flicking through the Telegraph’s 100 defining cultural moments of the Noughties, to see which ones I missed. Damn that Proust translation.

Marty and Katie

Noughties culture might best be summed up by this; Martin Amis vs Katie ‘Jordan’ Price:

“She has no waist, no arse ... an interesting face ... but all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone.”

And on roughly the same theme, at my other blog, I finally pinpoint the film that encapsulates the decade.

$0

One of the most though- and argument-provoking books of the Noughties has been Chris Anderson’s Free, in which he argues that giving stuff (in particular intellectual property) away is the future of business. Libby Purves of The Times begs to differ:

Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is not innately free, nor the infrastructure of news reporting. Until food, clothes, housing and transport are doled out free, content-makers need to be paid. The theory that advertising revenues will cover that, in any medium, is tosh.

That said, those nice people at Amazon seem to be edging over to Anderson’s side of the bed. Amazon Vine is offering the chance to get a free copy of The Noughties: go here for details.

Making it up as you go along

Not quite a list of the best books of the Noughties, but a snapshot of the decade in fiction: Borders promotes the highlights. I’d plump for Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World. What about you?

(See Chapter Four for more about the books of the past 10 years.)

William’s windmill

Chapter 3 (‘Is it me or is it getting hot in here?’) of The Noughties turned out to be a pretty gloomy overview of the state of the environment in the decade; I wish I’d known about William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill from junk to generate electricity for his village in Malawi. William, who left school at 14, kept up his scientific education with the help of a local library. He’s now 22, and has just published a book about his project; here’s his blog.

Dan Brown: beyond good and evil?

In Chapter Four of The Noughties, I discussed the biggest (if not necessarily the best) books of the decade, and the surrounding phenomena: Oprah; the Kindle; chick lit; misery memoirs; JK Rowling; and of course Dan Brown.

Sadly, although we knew Brown’s sequel to The Da Vinci Code was in the pipeline, it was embargoed until the middle of this month. The subject matter of The Lost Symbol is a little less provocative than that of his previous volume – Freemasonry rather than Catholicism – which has enabled critics to focus their energies on another controversial facet of Brown’s success: his writing skills. How can such as bad writer sell so many copies? Is he really a bad writer, or is just not a ‘literary’ writer? Do such distinctions matter? In a decade of e-mail, Twitter and texting, how many people know or care? Here are a few contributions to the debate, from the Daily Telegraph (London) and the Globe and Mail (Toronto). Philip Pullman hates it; John Grisham is more sympathetic. At the Daily Beast, Michael Baigent (who unsucessfully sued Brown for plagiarism) is dismissive; Brennig Jones, meanwhile, castigates those who castigate Brown, but doesn’t actually say he’s any good.

In fact, nobody does; the best his fans can come up with is “I like it”, which isn’t quite the same. Is one of the best-selling authors of the Noughties literally indefensible? And what does that say about our age?