Tournament of Books discussion

A thread to discuss options for an event for next fall.
Below find a summary of the suggestions from people on the final survey.

Longlist books that didn't make the shortlist (5)

"Classics"

Mixed-genre tournament (2)

Translated titles (3)

- Books in Translation under 250 pages (from one continent and we can do a different continent each year)

Favorites published in the 16 years prior to the start of the ToB

Favorite Lit Fic that didn't make the longlist

Speculative Fiction

"Who did it better" matchups

Tourney of books on underrated lists

Tournament of Runner Ups

Tournament of Zombies that didn't make the final/ didn't win

Tournament of Horror

Personally, I agree with the person that said over on the other thread (sorry, I forget who it was) that it should stay somehow ToB-related, since that is the thing that joins us all in this particular group.

The other thing that we have to consider is the reading burden. This worked in terms of participation in part because there was a reason to assume that many of us had read, or were at least aware of, all these books. This factor would push us towards any of the suggestions that involve other iterations of the shortlist books (e.g., zombies, runner-ups).

My personal vote would be for longlist titles that didn't make the shortlist, (with people having to nominate their favorites since a survey including all the longlist titles ever would be prohibitively long).

That being said, I would be happy to retain my position as survey master for anything that we decided to do, since this has been so much fun.

"Tournament of Horror..." could be a book title.

Thanks for being so generous with your time, Maggie! So appreciated, this has been so fun.

I do like the idea of longlist titles, but yes there are so many! If we did that, hopefully there would be some discussion beforehand, so those who weren't familiar with the titles could get excited for books we hadn't heard of.

Another possible idea to make it more manageable Translated (or genre, or speculative, or underrated list, etc.) titles not selected from the longlist...

Tournament of runner ups or Zombies that didn't win might also be fun (although we'd probably have repeats from this year.)

Can someone explain the "Who did it better" idea?

One vote for the "never-made-the-shortlist" books. I might be leaning this way b/c I know I would nominate Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Never had I been so certain of a book making the shortlist and then...crushed. ARGH.

Cantoras, Night Boat to Tangier, Inland, The Great Believers, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Bangkok Waits for Rain, and yes, Disappearing Earth... I've read a lot of good longlist ones.

Kyle wrote: "Cantoras, Night Boat to Tangier, Inland, The Great Believers, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Bangkok Waits for Rain, and yes, Disappearing Earth... I've read a lot of good longlist ones."

I was flabbergasted Cantoras wasn't included in the short list tbh! And I loved Bangkok Waits for Rain. It came out the year I was focusing on SE Asia in my reading and it was perfect.

Can someone confirm for me, that 2010 was the first year there was an actual long list instead of only the list of 16-18 books being announced in 2005-2009? I could swear there was a couple earlier longlists than 2010...

https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

I can't find 2012's longlist?

Jenny (Reading Envy) wrote: "Kyle wrote: "Cantoras, Night Boat to Tangier, Inland, The Great Believers, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Bangkok Waits for Rain, and yes, Disappearing Earth... I've read a lot of good longlist on..."

Cantoras didn't even make the longlist for that year! One of my all-time favorite novels. So sad it never got a chance. If we're going with longlist books for next fall I'm guessing I wouldn't be the only one thrilled to discuss A Girl Returned... :)

I see a few other gems from the 2020 list like Red at the Bone, The Old Drift, Sabrina & Corina: Stories, and The Nickel Boys that I wouldn't mind revisiting.

From the 2019 list I'm eyeing Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Heads of the Colored People, and Small Country. Better stop there or I could get sucked into this all day!

Kyle wrote: "Cantoras, Night Boat to Tangier, Inland, The Great Believers, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Bangkok Waits for Rain, and yes, Disappearing Earth... I've read a lot of good longlist ones."

Yes to all of these, Kyle. We could have a pretty amazing tourney next fall it seems!

I keep thinking Cantoras made it on, because I heard about it when the longlist went up. Well, it's spectacular - hopefully President and the Frog makes it on this year's list!

Disappearing Earth. Disappearing Earth. Disappearing Earth.

I nominate it 3 times.

Lauren wrote: "From the 2019 list I'm eyeing Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Heads of the Colored People, and Small Country. Better stop there or I could get sucked into this all day!..."

Cantoras was such a purple-prosed sap-fest for me, but I found Disappearing Earth to be terrific. And those 3 from 2019 get strong thumbs up from me!

An idea to make it more manageable if we do longlist tournaments, would be to start with the first four years of the longlists for the first year. SO if 2010 is the first year with a longlist (IS 2010 the first year with an actual longlist?), then the first longlist choices for the first tournament would be taken from 2010-2013 longlists. Then the year after that, the longlist choices could be from 2015-2018. Then the year after that 2019-2022. Just an idea! But I don't know how many choices people would have from 2010-2013...

What if we discover some absolutely brilliant 2011 book from the longlist that we never would have found without this tournament?

C wrote: "An idea to make it more manageable if we do longlist tournaments, would be to start with the first four years of the longlists for the first year. SO if 2010 is the first year with a longlist (IS 2..."

I think that this is a great idea, the only thing that makes me hesitate is that there is the same thing you raised: do people know the books on the longlist that far back well enough to make nominations?

If we a tournament in October, and we want judges, then we need the shortlist by May 1st in order to give them a month to read two books and make a judgement

My thought on a timeline for a Longlist tournament would be this:
Now to March 2022: people can nominate books from past longlists for consideration
Late March 2022: (On the last day of ToB 2022) announce the longlist of nominated books and launch survey to select the shortlist
Late April 2022: Close voting
May 1st 2022: Announce the shortlist and send first round assignments to judges.

I'm assuming that after the longlist announcement tomorrow, this group's reading life will be (rightly) focused on the 2022 ToB, so we're going to have to rely on people's existing favorites for nominations, which makes me concerned about a constraint on nominations more specific than "the longlists" but if you guys think that you have know enough of the books on the longlist to make nominations within a constraint, please say so!

Have I mentioned that I nominate Disappearing Earth?

Maggie wrote: "C wrote: "An idea to make it more manageable if we do longlist tournaments, would be to start with the first four years of the longlists for the first year. SO if 2010 is the first year with a long..."

I think this setup sounds great. Timeline makes sense and specific nominations (rather than a survey with the hundreds of options listed) should keep it manageable. My nominations would definitely skew toward the more recent years, but I'd be open to checking out some older gems if folks here loved them.

Has anyone mentioned Augustown by Kei Miller, the Jamaican novelist, poet and essayist? It was pubbed in 2017, so would have been on the 2018 long list. It’s probably a good example of a fabulous book that, amongst the glories of the long list, didn’t get much traction, but would be wonderful for some sort of tournament of undiscovered or overlooked favorites.

Jan:Augustown :: Ellen:Disappearing Earth, is what I’m trying to say. I have Ellen-levels of love for Augustown. 🤪 BTW, Ellen, I second your noms for Disappearing Earth.

And Peggy, who also was crushed at the omission of Disappearing Earth. (See that subtle Hamilton reference I worked in there?)

I’m already thinking of this as the Tournament of Crushing Omissions.

AND Peggy.

tee hee

So I bugged TMN about my longlist questions, and if anyone is curious, Andrew replied that 2010 was the first year for a longlist, but also somehow they skipped a published longlist for 2012. However, they did have a great thread asking everyone what should be included that year.

Kyle wrote: "I keep thinking Cantoras made it on, because I heard about it when the longlist went up. Well, it's spectacular - hopefully President and the Frog makes it on this year's list!"

I hope so. I have it but haven't read it yet.

Jan wrote: "And Peggy, who also was crushed at the omission of Disappearing Earth. (See that subtle Hamilton reference I worked in there?)

I’m already thinking of this as the Tournament of Crushing Omissions."

Love it!

C wrote: "So I bugged TMN about my longlist questions, and if anyone is curious, Andrew replied that 2010 was the first year for a longlist, but also somehow they skipped a published longlist for 2012. Howev..."

Is there somewhere online I can find the older long lists? (I am cursing myself for asking.....)

they are pretty much the first or second result if you search for "20XX Tournament of books longlist"

Ellen wrote: "Have I mentioned that I nominate Disappearing Earth?"

Hey! I called dibs on DE! ;)

Looking at the Long List I thought that authors that have had multiple books in the TOB and/or long list might be a fun tournament (maybe not for the Franzen/Powers non-fans). I would think there are more than 16. We could vote on all the books in this set and each writer would only have one book in the tournament--their top vote-getter. Meaning that if a writer had more than one book in the top 16 they would only get one book in the tournament. Books from this year's favorite's tournament might be excluded (ex. Mary Toft and not Version Control).

Brock wrote: "Looking at the Long List I thought that authors that have had multiple books in the TOB and/or long list might be a fun tournament (maybe not for the Franzen/Powers non-fans). I would think there a..."

Oh I thought you would say the beginning matchups would be between two books by the same writer, meaning there would only be eight writers in that tournament. (For example: Mary Toft vs. Version Control in the first round.) That would be a bit sad though.

Maggie, thank you for doing the timing of the last tournament so perfectly!

So I went through ALL the longlists, and I must say... credit must be given: the ToB crew DID do a good job of choosing some great books from their longlists. (Or maybe I'm biased at this point, with my fondness for so many of these books read because of the ToB.) Of course, some books would fall through the cracks, but there are TOO MANY good books in a year. The ToB does a good job! And I hope they don't take this Also Rans Tournament at all in the wrong way. What I did learn: no matter how many of these I have really wanted to read, even before they appeared on the longlists, really the shove to read them is mostly from the ToB shortlists. So if I remove books that made the shortlists, I have probably read .01% of the longlists! Yikes! So really I have two lists:

Longlist books I would definitely love to see in our tournament, loved and still love:
Far North - Marcel Theroux 2010
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell 2011
Night Film - Marisha Pessl 2014
Get in Trouble - Kelly Link 2016
Orphans of the Carnival - Carol Birch 2017
The Last Days of New Paris - China Miéville 2017
The Book of M - Peng Shepherd 2019
Severance - Ling Ma 2019

Books on the TBR, haven't read yet, and would probably love to see in the running (I'm TRYING to read some of these between other book obligations):
Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat 2011
By Blood - Ellen Ullman 2013
S - J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst 2014
Tenth of December - George Saunders 2014
The Only Ones - Carola Dibbell 2016
Delicious Foods - James Hannaham 2016
Dear Thief - Samantha Harvey 2016
I Am Radar - Reif Larsen 2016
The Last Flight of Poxl West - Daniel Torday 2016
Gold Fame Citrus - Claire Vaye Watkins 2016
Nobody Is Ever Missing - Catherine Lacey 2016
The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray 2017
Barkskins - Annie Proulx 2017
In the Distance - Hernan Diaz 2018
Refuge - Dina Nayeri 2018
Some Trick - Helen DeWitt 2020
Black Sunday - Tola Abraham 2021
Earthlings - Sayaka Murata 2021
Or What You Will - Jo Walton 2021

For 2012 if we use that crowdsourced list for choices (https://themorningnews.org/post/your-...), since there is no long list:
Pym - Mat Johnson
The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson

This is me paring the choices down, I promise. I also wouldn't mind seeing a Victor LaValle book in the running, since I think he is or has been behind the scenes of the ToB, so he is never actually eligible. I have only read The Devil in Silver. I liked it!

I've been thinking about a suggestion since the longlist came out and some of us were disappointed by how many great books from this year weren't on it. Now with the shortlist reveal I'm feeling stronger about this. It would not be a snub or substitute to the official ToB in any way, but just an outlet for the enthusiasm for the wonderful literature of 2021 that we might want to discuss together.

Would folks be interested in a "tournament that wasn't" where we each nominate up to ~10 books from 2021 that we think are great ToB books, then we run a tournament of them in the fall? This could be longlisters that didn't make the shortlist, or other ToB-type books that didn't make the longlist (but should have!).

A few adjustments I was thinking of:

Someone made a point that reading 16-ish additional books for a fall tournament on top of the summer camp books, new books for that year, etc. was a lot, and I agree. I'm in four other book clubs and my monthly book commitments are pretty intense. What if we made the tournament half the size, of just 8 books (determined by the nominations, which might require a second round of votes to narrow it down), but increased the judges since we had a lot of excitement about judging the ToF this year. I personally would like to try my hand at writing up a judgement. :) The way we could have more room for judges would be to have three per matchup, so the book with either two or three votes from those judges would move forward. That way it's three people judging for each pairing which means less pressure and more in-depth participation.

Thoughts on this or some other way to get more love for the 2021 books left out of the tournament this year?

Lauren wrote: "I've been thinking about a suggestion since the longlist came out and some of us were disappointed by how many great books from this year weren't on it. Now with the shortlist reveal I'm feeling st..."

I Looove your ideas, Lauren! It would make me feel a little better about some of the amazing books we didn't get to hash out. And I think it should be easier to organize.

Lauren wrote: "I've been thinking about a suggestion since the longlist came out and some of us were disappointed by how many great books from this year weren't on it. Now with the shortlist reveal I'm feeling st..."

I LOVE your idea of a mini tournament - I'm in!

So I love the idea of an 8 book tournament, which also means that we have more time to set it up because it’s a whole round less that we need to give the judges space.

If we have multiple judges per round, we’d end up needing more, not less, but I think it would be fun.

I will admit I had kind of gotten attached to the idea of the tournament of longlist favorites, both because I have some, and because there are a lot of former longlist books that I would love to read. And yes, I could just read them, but what’s the fun in that?

Possible solution: Longlist favorites this year, books that didn’t make the tournament at all next year (with a window, maybe books since 2020 that didn’t make the longlists?)

I can always create another poll and see what the masses prefer.

Maggie wrote: "So I love the idea of an 8 book tournament, which also means that we have more time to set it up because it’s a whole round less that we need to give the judges space.

If we have multiple judges p..."

I'm open to that! Maybe one final poll for what we do next fall? It could include a question of whether you'd like to judge a round, to see how many potential judges we'd have? Thanks for all your work on this, Maggie!

Lauren, we did do this exact thing one year -- does anyone remember when it was? We called it the Alt-ToB, and were thrilled to find out that the Powers-that-be at the ToB were actually following us. I'm pretty sure the book that won was Delicious Foods, so that could tell us when. I'm guessing there's still a thread for it, long inactive.

Oh, but there were 16 books.

Ellen wrote: "Lauren, we did do this exact thing one year -- does anyone remember when it was? We called it the Alt-ToB, and were thrilled to find out that the Powers-that-be at the ToB were actually following us..."

2015-16, Ellen! I remember it well because it's when I really began to power-read contemporary literary fiction, and also because I got to know the people who participated as judges so well.

Jennifer D. and I chose the books, 8 each. I had the idea I should read as many books as possible before choosing my 8, and that's how I learned I really can read about 60 books in 2 weeks if I put my mind to it.

Here is a link to the final, Sweetland vs. Delicious Foods, so you can see who our judges were!

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Oh, lark, thanks so much for linking! It was really fun to relive that. I did have a vague idea that I was out of the country and off the grid for a significant part of the tournament, and my comments do reflect that...I also remember reading The Portable Veblen as part of it and being utterly charmed.

Ellen wrote: "Oh, lark, thanks so much for linking! It was really fun to relive that..."

Me too! I remember especially that what everyone wrote was perfect--we ran the judgments exactly as written. Just a wonderful fun time and -all- of the books we read remain special to me. Among other things, I read my first David Vann novel because of alt-tob (Aquarium).

I think Portable Veblen was another year (?) because I haven't read it yet! Funnily enough I just got it from the library, though!

Here is where you can see all 16 books, and the match-ups:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

lark wrote: "2015-16, Ellen! I remember it well because it's when I really began to power-read contemporary literary fiction,..."

That was fun to go back and read my judgment. Funnier than I remember it being.

...and mine was just as disgruntled as I remember it being. And I'm startled to see how many of the books I didn't read!

Long list trivia:
As C tells us, the ToB first began releasing a long list in 2010, and skipped doing so in 2012.
The shortest long list was in 2010, with 50 books.
The longest long list was in 2017, with 120 books.

All long lists since 2010:

2010 - 50 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2011 - 85 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2012 - skipped

2013 - 61 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/an...

2014 - 93 books
https://themorningnews.org/post/the-t...

2015 - 62 books
https://themorningnews.org/post/the-l...

2016 - 86 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2017 - 120 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2018 - 72 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2019 - 76 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2020 - 62 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2021 - 77 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

2022 - 68 books
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...

Phyllis, you are, as always, my hero.

P.S. I vote for Disappearing Earth. Surprise!

Ellen wrote: "Phyllis, you are, as always, my hero."

Aw shucks, Ellen - guess I'll also have to vote for Disappearing Earth.

lark wrote: "Ellen wrote: "Oh, lark, thanks so much for linking! It was really fun to relive that..."

Me too! I remember especially that what everyone wrote was perfect--we ran the judgments exactly as written..."

So much fun to look back at those threads! I loved judging, it was a a great experience.

A mini tournament sounds fab to me too.

Ellen wrote: "Phyllis, you are, as always, my hero."

WOOT WOOT!

This is great and everything, and I suppose I should create a google sheet to make it easy to manage. . .

(OK, OK, I will volunteer)

Edited to add link: (no guarantees, let me know if I missed any)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...