Category: reading
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2025 Tournament of Books: Martyr! vs. Rejection
Today’s matchup is a pair of debuts. Kaveh Akbar is a well-known poet making his debut as a novelist while Tony Tulathimutte whose story, “The feminist,” brought him some notoriety makes his book-length debut with a collection of linked stories. Both books caught my attention before this year’s Tournament of Books (I’m apparently becoming increasingly…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Headshot vs. The Book of Love
Today’s matchup sees the debut novel from Kelly Link who’s been publishing short fiction for years against a novel in stories by Rita Bullwinkel, the current fiction editor of McSweeney’s. Headshot has gotten a lot of love and after a couple of podcast interviews, this book fell on my radar even before the Tournament of Books.…
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2025 Tournament of Books: James vs. The Book Censor’s Library
The first “regular” match of the tournament also feels like an unfair match-up. On the one side, we have a small-feeling book, The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa (a new name to me), on the other side we have the goliath, Percival Everett’s major publisher (how did this take so long?) debut coming on…
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2025 Tournament of Books: The Play-In Round
This year, I was faced with a number of familiar names in the play-in round. I’d read Alison Espach’s previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance at the end of 2023, which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t reading it in the wake of my brother’s premature death. Miranda July was a guest at…
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My favorite reads of 2024
Somehow, this year, I managed to blow past my previous records for numbers of books read and end the year with 154 books read. As usual, a full accounting of the books is at Goodreads. My favorite books of the year, in no particular order. The Wedding People by Alison Espach. This starts out seeming…
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The Tournament of Books short list is here!
Very excited to see this year’s list is out and to also note that I’ve been very good at hitting notable front-list books of late. Of the 18 books on the short list, I’ve read five and four more were on my to-read list, so reading everything on the list before the tournament begins will…
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If I were asked for my ten books of the 2000s for the New York Times list
Not that they asked, but if they had, I went through my reading log and did the painful winnowing down of books I’ve read published in 2000 or later down to ten “best” books (the last seven to get cut really hurt) to the following (in order by publication date): Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store vs Blackouts/The Bee Sting
And the final match-up of the Tournament of Books. I used to think that the judgments and reviews were done in real time, judges in later rounds furiously working their way through the books to be sure they were able and hoping that the book they’d left at the bottom of the stack of potential…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Guest vs The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
So many of the match-ups in this year’s tournament have felt like we were looking at two books dropped in from different universes, in many cases with radically different ideas of what a novel could be. This match-up, on the other hand, is between two books that fit comfortably into high-school me would consider to be…