Tournament of Books
I am taking this week off from Word Suitcase, but if you want to read something I wrote, I did participate in the Tournament of Books as a judge. I was assigned Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks, two very different novels, and I had a great time reading them as a pair. Here’s an excerpt:
A screenshot of the Tournament of Books website
One of fiction’s many allures is that someone’s in charge. Real life, chaotic and narratively unsatisfying, offers no such comfort. But a story has an author. A novel is a microcosm with the name of its particular god printed right on the cover.
Both of these books deal with faith, doubt, and belief in a higher power. True, in Transcendent Kingdom the higher power in question is the Christian God, or at least a god of some kind, a grand source of meaning and purpose in the universe, and in We Ride Upon Sticks the higher power is a dark force that the members of a high school field hockey team summon with witchcraft and name “Emilio” after Emilio Estevez. Both books are structured around characters’ prayers, pleas, and offerings. Write to God (or Emilio) and find yourself.
The Tournament of Books has cultivated such a fantastic community of readers and I’m so invested in this year’s books and finding out what everybody thinks of them. It was such a pleasure to participate.
If you’re new to this newsletter because you read my ToB judgment this week, hello and welcome! Word Suitcase will resume next Sunday with its regular program of whatever words and etymologies halt the darting rabbit of my attention and whatever romance (or other) novels I happen to read.
