Category: reading
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2025 Tournament of Books: Margo’s Got Money Troubles vs. Someone Like Us
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…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Liars/The Wedding People vs. The Book of George
Today brings the first of the counterfactual matchups in my commentary since Hannah Pearl Utt inexplicably chose Liars to advance from the play-in round. So let me talk about The Book of George. This book hits a lot of the same sort of notes that Liars does from a hapless man failing at relationships. But unlike Liars, the focus…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Colored Television vs. The Extinction of Irena Rey
Today’s pair of novels is another wildly disparate pairing. Danzy Senna’s Colored Television is a realist portrayal of a novelist and low-ranking academic tempted into television writing, albeit on spec with a producer of dubious motivation. The sole bit of surrealism is when Senna and her family move into a retirement home towards the end of…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Orbital vs. The History of Sound
Before it won the Booker, I was largely unaware of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital but I picked it up not too long after it won curious to see what this book was that the Booker judges felt was better than James. I had kind of expected the title to refer to freeways as I’ve generally heard the word…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Great Expectations vs Beautyland
Today’s matchup includes a pair of very disparate books. Vinson Cunningham, a former Obama campaign worker turned New Yorker staff writer, wrote a novel that’s about his time on the Obama campaign without ever explicitly naming Obama or any of the other major figures in the campaign. Giving it the title Great Expectations certainly did nothing to…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Martyr! vs. Rejection
Today’s matchup is a pair of debuts. Kaveh Akbar is a well-known poet making his debut as a novelist while Tony Tulathimutte whose story, “The feminist,” brought him some notoriety makes his book-length debut with a collection of linked stories. Both books caught my attention before this year’s Tournament of Books (I’m apparently becoming increasingly…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Headshot vs. The Book of Love
Today’s matchup sees the debut novel from Kelly Link who’s been publishing short fiction for years against a novel in stories by Rita Bullwinkel, the current fiction editor of McSweeney’s. Headshot has gotten a lot of love and after a couple of podcast interviews, this book fell on my radar even before the Tournament of Books.…
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2025 Tournament of Books: James vs. The Book Censor’s Library
The first “regular” match of the tournament also feels like an unfair match-up. On the one side, we have a small-feeling book, The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa (a new name to me), on the other side we have the goliath, Percival Everett’s major publisher (how did this take so long?) debut coming on…
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2025 Tournament of Books: The Play-In Round
This year, I was faced with a number of familiar names in the play-in round. I’d read Alison Espach’s previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance at the end of 2023, which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t reading it in the wake of my brother’s premature death. Miranda July was a guest at…