Tournament of Books discussion

Here are the books! We hope hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have.


November and December will be our "Reading Period." During this time we will keep track of people's progress through the 16 novels, and post that progress here in the group. The more readers who read with us and share their opinions the better this experience will be for everyone. (And do feel free to invite your reading friends to join us!)

After we’ve all had a chance to read the books in November and December, and once the judges have forwarded their secret judgments about which book to advance to the next round, we’ll begin our very own alt.Tournament in January, with the decisions of our illustrious judges posted daily.

In lieu of awarding a Rooster, the alt.TOB gremlins will be awarding prizes to up to 10 people who read all 16 books and review them on Goodreads. If more than 10 people read all 16 books then our winners will be chosen randomly. Prizes will be a book chosen for you personally after we look over your “favorites” lists.

A word about Oreo, by Fran Ross. (Surprise!) First published in 1974 it has no business being here...except the novel bombed in 1974, the author died young without ever writing another novel, and after many many years of being out of print New Directions republished it in 2015. So we have taken the ALT in our tournament to heart and included it here as one of the best publications of the year. We also think it makes for a great contrast to The Sellout which many of us have already read and which is probably a strong TOB contender for 2016.

Happy reading everyone, and thank you for doing this with us.


The Final 16

• Gutshot: Stories, by Amelia Gray
• Girl Waits with Gun, by Amy Stewart
• Fifteen Dogs, by André Alexis
• Under the Udala Trees, by Chinelo Okparanta
• Aquarium, by David Vann
• Man Tiger: A Novel, by Eka Kurniawan
• Oreo, by Fran Ross
• Delicious Foods, by James Hannaham
• The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold, by Jeanette Winterson
• The Mountain Story, by Lori Lansens
• Sweetland, by Michael Crummey
• Landfalls, by Naomi J. Williams
• The Star Side of Bird Hill, by Naomi Jackson
• Undermajordomo Minor, by Patrick deWitt
• Welcome to Braggsville, by T. Geronimo Johnson
• The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli


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The Match-Ups & Judges:


Round One:

1. Under the Udala Trees v. The Story of My Teeth
Judge: nomadreader

2. Sweetland v. The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold
Judge: Jane

3. Welcome to Braggsville v. The Mountain Story
Judge: Ryan

4. Girl Waits with Gun v. Aquarium
Judge: Jen

5. The Star Side of Bird Hill v. Man Tiger: A Novel
Judge: Topher

6. Landfalls v. Oreo
Judge: jo

7. Delicious Foods v. Fifteen Dogs
Judge: Jason

8. Undermajordomo Minor v. Gutshot: Stories
Judge: Michele


Round Two/Quarterfinals

Judges: Amberbug; Drew; Rebecca H.; Amy


Round Three/Semifinals

Judges: Heather; Gayla


Finals

Judges: Rachel; Arianna; Ellen; Katie; Darryl; Kendra
(More information on finals voting will follow.)


An alt.TOB bracket sheet has been created for you, and is viewable and printable in Google Docs

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I am working away like crazy this morning to get information shared in the group as quickly as possible. New threads will be popping up throughout the morning.

Fantastic! I love the list. Now off to start reading.

It's a great list! I am super-excited about this.

Wow, this list rocks! It is like Christmas morning and Santa just delivered, BIG TIME. I love my pair and am off to get ahold of them.

Yes, great list!! I have one of the books on my shelves, so I know where to start (Oreo).

Awesome list. I'm super excited. I have already read Delicious Foods, Sweetland, The Aquarium, and half of Welcome to Braggsville. All of the others are either available in my library now, or I was able to request them without a very long wait (besides Girl with the Gun; I'm like 50th in the request line but they have a lot of copies of that title so it should move quickly) except for Fifteen Dogs, which my library system surprisingly does not have. However, it's available on Kindle for less than 10 bucks. Score!

YAY!!! Thanks for all of the excited feedback already. So happy to hear your responses!! :)

Great list! I'm excited about my four potential reads, all of which are available at my library. I'll be starting them as soon as I finish Gold Fame Citrus, which I strongly recommend if you have any interest in post-apocalyptic fiction.

The list looks great!

Drew wrote: "Great list! I'm excited about my four potential reads, all of which are available at my library. I'll be starting them as soon as I finish Gold Fame Citrus, which I strongly recommend if you have a..."

Gold Fame Citrus hung around on my lists for the longest time -- glad to hear your strong recommendation, Drew.

Great list. Love that you've included Oreo.

Drew wrote: "Great list! I'm excited about my four potential reads, all of which are available at my library. I'll be starting them as soon as I finish Gold Fame Citrus, which I strongly recommend if you have a..."

Drew, I just learned that you are female, by reading the judges' bios. All these years I thought you were a guy! I want to read Gold Fame Citrus.

Wow. I'm judging the obscure round! Excellent.

Topher wrote: "Wow. I'm judging the obscure round! Excellent."

And I get to read both those books too! Excellent.

Topher wrote: "Wow. I'm judging the obscure round! Excellent."

Love your response!! Something about the bird and the tiger duking it out amuses me to no end. Nothing to do with the stories themselves... just the titles. :)

Judy wrote: "Drew wrote: "Great list! I'm excited about my four potential reads, all of which are available at my library. I'll be starting them as soon as I finish Gold Fame Citrus, which I strongly recommend ..."

I believe there's also a male Drew in this group. Maybe I should use my FB profile pic (me at the top of the Eiffel Tower) rather than the gnome holding my library card on GR. Or not.

Two Drews. Now I am really confused. Maybe not the Eiffel Tower right now. Gnomes are more comforting.

I'm so glad everyone is adorning their comments with enthusiastic exclamation points! That's great.

It became very clear in the last several days that Jennifer and I weren't trying for a list of the "best fiction of 2015" (I would have thrown my hands up and listed the NBA longlist and eligible Bookers, boring) or even "my personal take on the best of 2015" (which would have included a lot more books in the categories of 'hopelessly experimental,' 'utterly harrowing,' and 'political satire that goes too far.')

Instead this list really is about giving everybody a chance to sample a lot of great fiction published this year, books we chose not only for quality but also for variety in the extreme. I'm thinking of it as a 16 course meal. We've got everything from an amuse-bouche to a couple of hefty main courses plus a big dessert and everything in between.

I'm hoping the variety of voices will make this all more ridiculously fun for judges, too, who will have a chance to decide the impossible task of judging two very different books against one another and of needing to grapple a bit with their own values re: literature.

Very excited for this!! I have only read one of the books but have 2 of them them sitting beside my bed waiting on me and 2 of them waiting for me on my Kindle. Time to read :)

This shortlist makes me so excited to start reading! I'm delighted y'all made the choice of including Oreo. That and Fifteen Dogs are the only two that I've read, but they were both excellent reads.

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the books; there's a bit of overlap with books already on my TBR list, but others are some I've definitely overlooked. To the library! :D

About Oreo: Do you know if there is any actual difference in the 1974 and 2015 eiditions? 1974 is available at my library.

Jason wrote: "About Oreo: Do you know if there is any actual difference in the 1974 and 2015 eiditions? 1974 is available at my library."

They're exactly the same except for the addition of an intro in the 2015 edition, which was also published in the New Yorker and is available here:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Fun & intriguing list!

I've read 2 (Sweetland & Delicious Foods) and both have been in my 'favorites of 2015' group, so I'm excited to check out the rest, those that have been on my radar and those that are new to me.

This is going to be fun. :D

Omg, just seeing this now...so excited!!!

Your reactions are all so great!! :)

So, I read books in both paper and e-pub formats. And I just geeked out creating a new 'alt-TOB' folder on my Nook. Wheee! :)

Jennifer wrote: "So, I read books in both paper and e-pub formats. And I just geeked out creating a new 'alt-TOB' folder on my Nook. Wheee! :)"

I had a little of the same excitement with my kindle paperwhite. :)

I'm so proud of my local public library: they have all but two of these titles! Here's a shout out to the Mid-Columbia Library System!

WOOT for libraries!! That's terrific, Drew.

@ Amberbug -- I suspected I would have company in the e-book organizing joy camp. Haha!!

I was sloppy with typos in posting the original list and have now fixed them. (Lansens and Stewart - names I know perfectly well and authors I adore... but hurrying and full brain got the better of me. Sorry about that!! Just wanted to mention it in case anyone notices 'last edited...' in the comment - that's what went on.)

Are individual threads for each book going to be created? or should we just start talking about books here?

Jason wrote: "Are individual threads for each book going to be created? or should we just start talking about books here?"

i wil be creating them jason -- just been busy/offilne, but hope to get to it this afternoon. :)

Thanks Jennifer! you are incredibly well organized and it's been so much fun working with you behind the scenes. ôヮô

No hurry. I was just curious. I have nothing to write yet, but I am listening to one of the books (not my judging pair) and it is incredible.

Jason wrote: "No hurry. I was just curious. I have nothing to write yet, but I am listening to one of the books (not my judging pair) and it is incredible."

i had hoped to get to them before now... but i have had an unusual 24-hours. i'll be on it in a bit. :)

Apologies to everyone for jamming the group with the threads for each of the books... but the books' folder is now finished, and the threads are ready for you whenever you need them! https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

What were the criteria for these books? Published in 2015 and.....?

Jennifer wrote: "Apologies to everyone for jamming the group with the threads for each of the books... but the books' folder is now finished, and the threads are ready for you whenever you need them! https://www.go..."

Jennifer -
Thanks so much for doing this.
The setup and information you provided is awesome!

jess wrote: "What were the criteria for these books? Published in 2015 and.....?"

oh, what a good question. Jennifer I hope will also answer. We started with this idea from Real.TOB:

In no way do we claim that the following 16 books constitute the definitive list of the best fiction released last year... But we do hope the list is representative of the outstanding literature we encountered in the last 12 months (admittedly, mostly in English, mostly in novel form, and mostly in America).

Then we had feedback from the group about limiting page count to under 400 (bye to a lot of TOB favorites) and not including series reads (bye to Atkinson and Ferrante). We got other feedback that we should try to pick books that would be 1) great reads, and 2) NOT be highly likely to be TOB contenders in 2016, so that we wouldn't overlap in any purposeful way w. the TOB experience. Also many requests for keeping the TOB tradition of including small press books, but to not be held to the tradition of including a YA book and the National Book Award winner.

So with that vague template Jennifer and I picked these books after much grueling deliberation about things like whether the list of 16 could make room for two stories about talking animals (we decided it couldn't, and my first quirkly love of the year Mort e got eliminated from further contention) we came up with this list.

A final big consideration in our book picks is that it's deliberately a list with a lot of variety of tone and theme, where we hope the judges will enjoy the task of pitting one book against another and that it will be a fun impossible task when the books themselves have so little in common other than Jennifer or I thought they were books that should be read.

Beverly wrote: "Jennifer -
Thanks so much for doing this.
The setup and information you provided is awesome! "

oh, you are so welcome, beverly! i hope it is all useful/interesting to everyone. i always like a bit of an intro./background to books and authors... and if people are not inclined that way, totally easy enough to scroll past it. :)

jess wrote: "What were the criteria for these books? Published in 2015 and.....?"

great question, jess!! poingu quoted this bit from the official TOB:

"In no way do we claim that the following 16 books constitute the definitive list of the best fiction released last year... But we do hope the list is representative of the outstanding literature we encountered in the last 12 months (admittedly, mostly in English, mostly in novel form, and mostly in America)."

but i will admit that i took all of it to heart except for the bracketed qualifiers. i felt it important to be a bit more diverse in considering books to include. the books did have to be available in the US - since that is key to the TOB project - but we looked at translated works and international authors as carefully as American authors. i wanted a variety of settings and diverse representation - which, most excellently, was something we both agreed on during the process.

poingu pretty much said everything else. :)

i hope these comments help answer your question!

I have so much reading to do. I thought I had read quite a bit in 2015 and I haven't read a single book on the list!

Becky wrote: "I have so much reading to do. I thought I had read quite a bit in 2015 and I haven't read a single book on the list!"

Hi Becky! I -thought- I knew a lot about fiction published in 2015. I've read over fifty books published this year which is many more than I usually read and I also religiously read many literary review magazines. But then I asked Jennifer to help me organize alt.tob and she immediately created a spreadsheet of literally sixteen gazillion novels published in 2015 that I'd never heard of, many of which I then read in a mini-marathon before we picked the books, and a couple of which made our final list. All I can say is that I'm never going to complain about the narrow lifeless sameness of literary fiction again. I feel like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek after he first looked at a drop of water under a magnifying lens--there is so much more out there than I ever knew!

poingu wrote: "Becky wrote: "I have so much reading to do. I thought I had read quite a bit in 2015 and I haven't read a single book on the list!"

Hi Becky! I -thought- I knew a lot about fiction published in 20..."

Yes, there are so many excellent books that get published each year and really how do you know if it is an excellent book until you read it. :)

I am always amazed on no matter how many books I read there are always so many more that I have not gotten to.

I am a new release junkie and had a list of 2015 books I wanted to read before the end of the year and now I am participating in the alt-TOB with a bunch of books that were not on my end-of-year reading but I am just enjoying myself.

Now I wondering what I am going to so when the TOB list comes out in January 2016, as I already have a tbr list for books being published in 2016 and if I am going to start 2016 being behind,

I've also started a 2016 tbr list but haven't finished my 2014 list yet! So many books!

FYI, I just started listening to an interview with Valeria Luiselli, the author of The Story of My Teeth on the podcast Between the Covers today. I hadn't remembered that it is going to be in the first round of the alt-TOB, so it was a pleasant surprise when I realized the book was in our tournament.

Beverly wrote: "Now I wondering what I am going to so when the TOB list comes out in January 2016, as I already have a tbr list for books being published in 2016 and if I am going to start 2016 being behind."

Something about participating in TOB in a serious way last year for the first time really kick-started my reading, where I found myself reading a lot more books just generally, even when TOB was going on.

April wrote: "FYI, I just started listening to an interview with Valeria Luiselli, the author of The Story of My Teeth on the podcast Between the Covers today. I hadn't remembered that it is going to be in the f..."

What do you know! When I went to download Luiselli's interview on ITunes to listen to it, I noticed that the the interview just before Luiselli's on Between the Covers was with Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot, at the opposite side of the brackets in our tournament. That's a very weird coincidence. Thanks April!

poingu wrote: "April wrote: "FYI, I just started listening to an interview with Valeria Luiselli, the author of The Story of My Teeth on the podcast Between the Covers today. I hadn't remembered that it is going ..."

Oh, I missed that. Thanks for catching that and letting us know.

i am just curious about how everyone's reading is going? i hope you are all enjoying the process and having a good time with the books!

my own progress is a bit slower than i hoped for, because life loves throwing curveballs, doesn't it? heh!! but, i have 4 books read, a 5th underway. and i am fairly decided that i am good with 2 other books that i won't be re-reading, so took that pressure off myself. (though i may still quickly skim them once my other reading is done.)