Category: reading
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2024 Tournament of Books: Chain-Gang All-Stars vs Brainwyrms
I first encountered Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s writing in his short story collection Friday Black. The first story in the collection, “The Finkelstein 5” blew me away so much that when I finished reading it in the back seat of a Lyft in January 2019, I wanted to tell the driver that he needed to pull over…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Guest vs The Shamshine Blind
The Guest promises chaos in the person of Alex, a call girl who’s on the run from a previous client from whom she stole a large sum of money and who had been hiding out in the Hamptons with a newer client until he grows bored of her presence and the fact that she damaged…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Big Swiss vs The Lost Journals of Sacajawea
Big Swiss was the only book in this year’s round that I’d read before the short list was announced thanks to my reading last summer’s Camp Tournament of Books selections. My thoughts on the book from last summer: “I found myself at turns fascinated and bored. The setup for the story was brilliant, but there…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store vs Open Throat
Open Throat is structurally similar to Dayswork in that it’s composed of short paragraph-long sections, but the resemblance ends there. The narrative is told from the perspective of a dispossessed mountain lion, inspired by the real-life P-22 (who’s mentioned in the acknowledgments). The story takes a bizarre twist where the mountain lion befriends a young woman…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Dayswork vs Cold People
Cold People starts as a possible romantic comedy: an American college student is vacationing with her family in Lisbon and accepts an invitation for a private boat tour with a local who feels they have a strange connection. And then. Aliens. The aliens serve largely as a huge plot device: All of humanity is given…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Boys Weekend vs Blackouts
I’ve often wondered how the original seeding works in the Tournament of Books. Are they looking for unlikely matchups? Is it just random? However it goes, this is certainly an odd pairing. Blackouts is very much the embodiment of the Important Novel. It won the National Book Award and treats of a Serious subject, a…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Play-in round
For the first time, I’ve made the effort to try to read all the Tournament of Books entries before the tournament starts instead of relying on dumb luck to let me have read perhaps two or three. Having done this, I’ve decided to do my own parallel judging (I’ve been filling out my brackets as…
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My favorite reads of 2023
2023 saw me returning to a more typical year of reading, with the vast majority of my reading being fiction again. I also ended up having a bit more reading time than usual so my total book count for the year was 124 books. The full list of books is available at GoodReads. My favorite…
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My favorite reads of 2022 (now with charts and graphs!)
2022 was an atypical year for reading for me largely because it turned out that 67% of the 103¹ books I’ve read this year were research for the novel, which, among other things, meant that my numbers got skewed in interesting ways, like the fact that only 29.5% of the books were fiction (compared to…