tmn's tournament of books (ilb pool?)

They're Cloud Atlas and The Finishing School, incidentally.

Exactly!

Publishers are insanely eager to kick up any small amount of interest in contemporary fiction among general readers. They simply haven't discovered the secret sauce that will make novels fly off the shelves: novels that double as diet books. It worked well for Diary of Bridget Jones - but it needs to be even more explcit in order for novels to reinvent themselves as relevant to today's pressing concerns.

Every novel from now one should have a major character who is overweight at the start, but - thanks to a fabulous diet regime that's fully delineated in the dialogue - becomes svelte and popular by the end. Then the whole publishing industry can bypass such silly excercises as this tournament and simply rake in the money like croupiers at a crooked roulette wheel.

I'm usually a bit behind the times, generally not getting to books at least until they're in paperback, so awards for new books are usually pretty meaningless to me until years later. I've never purchased a book specifically because it won an award, though perhaps major awards have made me more aware of a particular book and indirectly spurred me to pick it up. (I wonder if many people who don't write book reviews read 16 newly published books in a year...)

I was hoping that there might be people here who had read a good number of them or who had strong feelings about some of the authors, but maybe I missed the mark. I do think The Morning News has an interesting idea for generating discussion of literary fiction and book awards.

Maybe the tournament would be more interesting if it weren't composed of new books...

BTW: Claire Miccio is Anthony's sister.

Interesting idea, mck, but how would the books be decided if they didn't have the parameters of release dates?

It's interesting that it's so difficult to find common ground when it comes to what books people have read in the last year. Probably part of the problem is that reading is a more solitary activity than watching a film or listening to music (these can be solitary, going to see a movie or a concert is a shared, public experience, and those activities provide incentives for people to keep current), and the publicity is much different--seems like I get most book recommendations through word of mouth, often borrowing books from friends a few months after they've read them.

It seems like there is more overlap when you look at a larger time frame. It would probably be possible to come up with a list of 16 books, at least half of which most avid readers of literary fiction have read over the last several years. Again, it's all arbitrary, and there's probably little purpose in having an award for selling well and getting good reviews and therefore getting enough positive publicity to get the attention of readers who then agree that they liked Fortress of Solitude better than The Curious Incident of Dog in the Night-Time or whatever.

And I didn't really mean it about the list being mediocre. There are some (in my opinion) mediocre books that shouldn't have been included and some (in my opinion) obvious oversights. But there are also books I was excited to see mentioned, like Harbor and The Unfinished Season, as they were rather overlooked in many of the best of lists.

I already have my strong suspicions about which two books will end up in the final round, btw.

Also we made it clear that these aren't necessarily the best books. Some were books that received a lot of hype, some were named again and again on best of the year lists, and some were just books that members of the selection committee felt passionate about. Charlotte Simmons isn't on there so we can beat up on it. It's on there because it was probably the biggest "event book" of the year. If we wanted to maximize our fun (and we do) there was no way we could leave it off. (Incidentally, I read IACS before this started and while there are parts of it that are unintentionally hilarious, other parts are really quite good. It's not nearly as bad as some say it is, according to me.)