Tournament of Books

February 22, 2005 9:19 AM

TMN's Tournament of Books Too often are literary awards arbitrary, dull, or meaningless. Too rarely are they determined by an NCAA-style Battle Royale of bloodthirsty competition. It’s time for a change. Round 2 is going now.
posted by dame (9 comments total)

I think their seeding is flawed.

The top seeds went to books that were much hyped before or after publication.

I thought I Am Charlotte Simmons received so much attention because it was reviled. Now it's pushed its way into the second round. This is the biggest disaster in the history of TMN's Tournament of Books. I expect the committee to make a lot of changes during the summer.
posted by underer at 9:58 AM on February 22, 2005

Too rarely are they determined by an NCAA-style Battle Royale of bloodthirsty competition.

It loses something without Dick Vitale.
posted by jonmc at 10:09 AM on February 22, 2005

Beatrix has what I think is the salient take.
posted by BT at 10:41 AM on February 22, 2005

I dunno, Underer, I thought Charlotte Simmons was hyped because it's Tom Wolfe.

My vote for biggest travesty is Cloud Atlas over The Finishing School. Just more of that nonsense preferring "ambition" over gems. I don't think it follows that there is always more to find in something floppy than something tight.
posted by dame at 10:44 AM on February 22, 2005

I haven't read The Finishing School, so I can't make that call. But I thought Cloud Atlas was far more than just ambitious. I can see how some might find parts of it hokey or forced, but it manages to turn genre parodies into beautiful structures, and it manages to make you care for characters who are both symbolic and psychologically complex. Of all the books I've read in the last year or so, it's probably my favorite.
posted by macrone at 11:38 AM on February 22, 2005

Dame: Okay, so Charlotte Simmons received so much attention because "Tom Wolfe" is like a kick me sign for books. I haven't read the book, but I got some enjoyment reading the reviews. Good call on Cloud Atlas. Why wasn't Gilead on the list? I thought that book was ambitious without needing to splay itself all over a map.
posted by underer at 2:20 PM on February 22, 2005

CBC radio does something similar with the survivor-style Canada Reads, but they only have five books every year.
posted by purtek at 2:30 PM on February 22, 2005

I am Charlotte Simmons (which I tore through in five days) is underrated, in my opinion--the first two thirds have some of the funniest writing I've read in some time, and the last third is still compulsively readable, even when its tone becomes less overtly comic. It isn't Ulysses, but it isn't the train wreck that reviewers have made it out to be, either.

Its characters are mostly stereotypical, but such characters are a feature of most social satires. The sex scenes are bad, but they're supposed to be bad. It doesn't tell you anything about college that you don't already know, but the purpose of the book isn't to discuss the details of college life, but to use college life as a means to meditate on human behavior. (Charlotte sits through a few lectures in a neuroscience course that touch on this, but reviewers rarely ever seem to go near those when discussing the book.) There are flaws in the book that show Wolfe's age (he refers to "PS3s" and "MP4s" as if he believes this will make him sound forward-thinking), but they're minor, and don't detract from the book's entertainment value.
posted by Prospero at 6:39 AM on February 23, 2005

I can't comment on the particular books under discussion since Cloud Atlas is the only one I've read (and was impressed by), but I review books for my local paper and I can tell you now that a lot of the "bestsellers" out there aren't worth the trees sacrificed for them. In general, status seems to be proportional th the cost of the advertising campaign, *not* the quality of the writing! Compare, for example Alice Sebold's "Lovely Bones" with Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and tell me Sebold is half the writer Morrison is...
posted by MadOwl at 7:26 AM on February 23, 2005