March Madness, to many people, means endless college basketball games, brackets and pools. March also is the month of book battles, particularly the annual Tournament of Books at The Morning News.
The ToB celebrates the best work of fiction published in the previous year. To whet the appetite, a huge list of possible contenders is published long in advance of the tourney before the entries are whittled down to 16 contenders. Recently, at least one YA entry and one genre work have been included. This year features many post-apocalyptic novels.
One judge reads two works that are in the same bracket and chooses the winner. Commentators, Kevin Guilfoile, John Warner, Elliott Holt and Laura van den Berg, contribute their observations.
This is the beauty of the ToB. The winners are interesting and sometimes surprising. The writing about why a work of fiction stood out and the ensuing discussions -- which sometimes get very lively -- are the highlight of the tournament. They are the reason I follow the tourney. To read wise commentary about fiction that has moved readers and to see a community of readers argue for the merits of various books is encouraging. It's an antidote to what I see in society daily, where money is more important than art, where power is more important than the people. (Brecht, that diary I hinted at last week would not come together but that last sentence touches on the theme.)
When two books are left, two books that earlier lost return in the Zombie Round.
The logo for the tournament is a red rooster, in honor of David Sedaris's brother. Each year, the winners are threatened with the presentation of a live rooster but that has yet to happen.
This is the first year a work written by a TMN staff member has been included in the shortlist. But based on the praise the novel has been received, it would be odd if Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See was not included.
This year's entries:
Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball -- Eight people vanish from their homes in a Japanese town. A signed confession leads to an arrest, but the suspect refuses to talk, even as his execution nears.
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor -- The Stanford water polo team captain suffers a dream-destroying injury, defies his father and then disappears. His father goes on a public lecture tour in hopes of drawing the son out, but starts an uprising instead.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr -- The WWII story of a blind French girl and a German boy that has been mightily praised.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante -- The final book in the Neopolitan Novels about Elena and Lila, who first met in My Brilliant Friend.
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay -- The story of the daughter of a rich Haitian is kidnapped but her father resists paying her ransom for 13 days, and the ordeal's aftermath.
Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer -- A brilliant young, working class professor discovers there is no place for logic at Cambridge.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James -- Seven gunmen stormed Bob Marley's house two days before he was to play at the Smile Jamaica Concert. This is the epic novel (at more than 700 pages) of those people and their times.
Redeployment by Phil Klay -- The National Book Award winner, a collection of brutal short stories about war and the soldiers who return.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel -- Shakespeare and a civilization that has collapsed, and a prophet.
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell -- A novel of interconnected tales and lives.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng -- A teenager is found dead and her family falls apart.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill -- A lovely prose poem about a woman who becomes a wife and a mother, and what those ties mean.
Adam by Ariel Schrag -- Teen Adam, staying with his sister in NYC, wonders if he has to pretend to be a trans guy to attract the girl of his dreams.
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters -- Life changes for a poor widow and her spinster daughter when they are forced to take in lodgers in London between the wars.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer -- First in the Southern Reach trilogy, the 12th expedition is about to set off to explore Area X, which has been cut off from the rest of the continent for ages.
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld -- An outsider, a woman with a man's name who worked as a sheep shearer in Australia, lives alone with a dog named Dog on a bleak British island sheep farm. Now the sheep are being killed one at a time.
The judges are named here.
Next to speculation about the Booker, this is my favorite competition. That is a term I use lightly, though, because it's the introduction of the works to a possibly wider audience and my chance to double-check if any of the contenders sound interesting that mean more to me than which book wins.
Out of this year's entries, I've read and liked Dept. of Speculation. I wanted to like Redeployment but the beginning story about shooting dogs and children, was more than I could take.
I've read and appreciated an earlier Marlon James novel (The Book of Night Women, which lost to the 2010 ToB winner Wolf Hall) so want to check this one. And Station Eleven is something I should have read by now. All the Birds, Singing is one of my current reads. The Ferrante and Ng have received loads of online love. And Roxane Gay appears to be a force of nature; her novel is in my TBR mountains.
Other previous winners include The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (which I like better in memory than I did at the time), A Mercy by Toni Morrison (which I loved), James McBride's The Good Lord Bird, Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Brief Wondrous Life Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (which is being taught now to undergradutes), Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Ali Smith's The Accidental and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.
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