Tag: rufi thorpe

The zombie round always throws weird little twists into the mix. Last year, my picks to face off in the finals were eliminated before they got to the finals but re-emerged as zombies. This year, one was eliminated in an upset, but will face my other pick for the finals in tomorrow’s round, meaning today […]

The official match-up this round is an easy choice for me. I found the formal experimentation of Margo’s Got Money Troubles to be intrusive and irritating while the formal experimentation of The Extinction of Irena Rey seemed delightful to me. It seems an easy choice to advance The Extinction of Irena Rey. Meanwhile in a parallel universe If […]

The one match of the quarterfinals where I did not successfully choose the matchup, thanks to Liars getting the nod over The Wedding People. So in the real-life matchup, we have Liars over Margo’s Got Money Troubles and while Margo has occasional issues with its structure, it at least didn’t feel like a giant lump of undigested autobiography like Liars did, […]

The last of the first-round matchups (which means that after this, my write-ups get a lot shorter since I’ll have already said my piece on each of the books). On the one hand, we have Margo’s Got Money Troubles, one of those easy to describe books: A college student who has become pregnant after having an […]

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 […]

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 […]