mon, 19-mar-2012, 16:35

Ouch. Well, my favorite book in this year’s Tournament of Books (The Art of Fielding) was taken out by Open City this morning. I also wasn’t too happy with Lightning Rods defeating Salvage the Bones earlier in the week. I felt like Lightning Rods was a far to simplistic (and dated) satire of work, and I had a hard time getting past that the book was almost entirely about hiring women to be prostitutes in order to alleviate sexual harassment suits and to improve male efficiency in the office. Parts of it were pretty funny, but compared against a well-written Katrina novel told from the perspective of a poor, pregnant teenager, I just don’t see it. The judge felt Salvage the Bones was too MFA, but I’d take overwrought writing and some technical errors over a book-length Porky’s movie anytime. Well, most of the time.

As for Open City, I liked it. The writing was nice. And there was a disturbing twist near the end that emphasized the same point that Barnes was making in his book: the way we view our past probably doesn’t match reality, or the way others view the things we did. But it had no plot to speak of, and only the narrator as a meaningful character. By the end, I’m not sure he was even a character I wanted to listen to. The Art of Fielding had a full story, multiple interesting characters, and I totally enjoyed the whole thing. To steal a phrase from one of the Tournament commentators, the book is in my wheelhouse: it’s about baseball, takes place at a small liberal arts college not unlike where I went to school, and there are smart people in it, saying intelligent things, but not necessarily doing them.

Here’s hoping Fielding comes back as a zombie.

Anyway, here’s what my brackets look like now:

I think 1Q84 and The Tiger’s Wife will be a close call, depending on whether the reviewer enjoys Murakami’s style of writing or not, or whether they enjoyed the stories in The Tiger’s Wife enough to look past the weak plot. I view the other brackets as pretty obvious choices, but one thing you learn by paying attention during a contest like this is that reading is a very subjective experience and if you enjoy a book, it’s really easy to ignore what other readers consider to be fatal flaws. Mentioned thus far: chewing the bark of a tree instead of just scraping it off (State of Wonder), the mechanics of operating a tractor (Salvage the Bones), failing the Bechtel Test (most of the books in the contest), MFA-ness in the writing (Tiger, Bones) how pleasant the characters or storyline was (Green Girl), and lots more.

Tomato tomahto, eh?

Update: Ugh. Lightning Rods just beat Sense of an Ending to move on. Guess I was wrong about which contests would be close.

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