Sunday Salon: the alternate Tournament of Books

-
The Sunday Salon.com
Happy Sunday! I'm sitting by the window watching the rain. Like much of the U.S., we're experiencing unseasonably hot temperatures. We're in the middle of getting three inches of rain this weekend, and I find myself wishing it were snow instead. Despite the weather, I am loving all of the Best of the Year book lists that keep popping up. One of my favorite events of the year is the Tournament of Books, and this week they released the longlist. I was devastated to see two of my favorite reads of 2015 (The Shore by Sara Taylor and Girl at War by Sara Novic) left off.


I'm participating in a new event: the Alt-ToB in the Tournament of Books group on GoodReads. I'm judging the first match-up of the first round: The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli and Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta. It's been so much fun to read and write a Tournament of Books verdict, but it is a challenge for me to not talk about these two books with anyone. I haven't tweeted, I haven't listed my ratings, and I've told the organizers who wins. I'm greatly looking forward to early January, when the alt ToB gets underway, so I can join the conversation about these two books. I'll post my full verdict here too (after it's posted on GoodReads.)

This experience has made me realize what a social reader I am. Over the years of blogging, I've shifted to writing reviews days, weeks and months in advance. It's an odd way to talk about books. Part of me is missing writing reviews right after I finish a book and immediately hitting Publish. There are a lot of good reasons for scheduling reviews, but as I think about my goals for 2016, I'm trying to figure out how to make this blog a better example of what I'm actually reading. Part of the problem: 27 unreviewed books (three are written and scheduled for January 2016.) I'll likely most mini-reviews of many of those to help me start 2016 with a fresh slate and new ideas for this space I treasure. I think part of what I love so much about reading prize lists are the conversations with other readers. I want to find a way to make reading and blogging more conversational again.

I'm off to enjoy the rest of Hawthorne's naptime reading one of my Bailey's Backlist Bucket List titles, Amy and Isabelle.

As an affiliate, I receive a small commission when you make a purchase through any of the above links. Thank you for helping to support my book habits that bring more content to this blog!

Comments

  1. TiDecember 16, 2015 at 12:43 PM

    I didn't know about the alternate TOB. I follow the TOB but man that long list this year is super long!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment. Happy reading!

Popular posts from this blog

book review: A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

-
Image
The backstory: A Dangerous Place  is the eleventh historical mystery featuring Maisie Dobbs. My reviews of the other eleven (plus Winspear's stand alone historical novel) are in my Book Review Database . The basics: Set four years after the last Maisie Dobbs novel, Leaving Everything Most Loved , in A Dangerous Place , we meet up with Maisie in Gibraltar in 1927 during the Spanish Civil War. She gets off her England-bound ship in Gibraltar because she's not quite ready to return. Note: this review contains spoilers about what happened in those four years of Maisie's life between books, all of which are revealed in this novel's first thirty pages.  My thoughts: Sunday I wrote about the Maisie Mail I received. These postcards appear in the book itself, along with many others. After setting the stage in Gibraltar in the opening pages (Maisie stumbles upon a dead body), Winspear recounts the last four years of Maisie's life in the form of postcards, letters, an
Read more

book review: Run by Ann Patchett

-
Image
The backstory: After loving State of Wonder  ( my review ), I set out to read all of Ann Patchett's books. The basics: Run  is the story of the Doyle family: Bernard, an Irish Catholic ex-mayor of Boston, his deceased wife Bernadette, their adult son Sullivan, and their two adopted college ages sons, Tip and Teddy, who are biological brothers. My thoughts: I'm beginning to think Ann Patchett is my soul sister. Her writing reaches me deeply, and I've adored everything she's written. It was a special treat to read Run , the novel of hers I knew the least about going in. Although I had the framework of two of her novels and one memoir, I didn't know what to expect. Run  isn't as universally loved as some of her other works, so I was particularly curious to see how it measured up. Admittedly, Run  started off slowly for me. It took two chapters to really get into the heart of the story, but once it happened, I was hooked. One of the things I love most about
Read more

book review: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

-
Image
The backstory: Gilead  won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2006. The basics: As Rev. Ames nears the end of his life in the 1950's, he begins a letter to his young son because Ames realizes his son is too young to really know him. Gilead  is that letter. My thoughts: Gilead  is a novel I'm been meaning to read for years. It's a character-driven, Midwestern narrative by one of our best contemporary writers. It should be a novel I love, yet I struggled to finish it and admit I was wowed by neither the story nor the writing. Gilead  seemed almost stream-of-consciousness at first. I appreciated that Robinson jumped right in: this novel is a letter from father to son; the reader's ignorance of these two characters is not the focus. As the novel progressed, more details began to be filled in, and the reader begins to understand the characters, setting and purpose. I enjoyed the fir
Read more