Americanah (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

This book is wonderful, even better than I was anticipating, and in hindsight I agree with the outrage that this was omitted from the 2013 Tournament of Books shortlist.

It is at heart a love story, the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, who fall in love in Nigeria, then move to America and London respectively, where their stories diverge and then start to, maybe, come together again. Ifemelu starts a blog about race from the perspective of a "Non-American Black," which allows Adichie to include discussions of privilege and race that I think would make this a valuable text to teach in college classes.

This makes it sound like it's "homework" reading, but it's totally not. Ifemelu is a wonderful character, and so are the rest of her friends and family that populate the novel (particularly her nephew Dike). She is observant, witty, flawed, smart, and sharply drawn, and she is easy to like and root for.

Ifem's outsider's view of America brings this country (and its relationship to race, and the experience of progressive liberals, and the Barack Obama phenomenon) all into sharper focus. I love the portrayal of Lagos too, which makes such an interesting counterpoint to the way it's portrayed in Graceland. This comes across as a far more well-rounded view of the country and I felt like it expanded my understanding of Nigeria.

But ultimately the observations on race and the specificity of place are a backdrop to a compelling, unpredictable, very human story told extremely well. Very highly recommended.

The Orphan Master’s Son (by Adam Johnson)

This is the book that won the 2013 Tournament of Books, so I had to read it to see if I liked it better than How Should a Person Be? or Building Stories. It also just won a Pulitzer, so I had high hopes.

My high hopes were completely exceeded. Holy shit. Read this book.

It is a fascinating, well-researched, often brutal (but still page-turning and entertaining) book about a boy who grows up in an orphanage in North Korea and then ends up having many adventures in the repressive North Korean regime. It's a wonderful subject for a book, and Johnson somehow even got to go to North Korea under Kim Jong Il for research. The interview after the book made me appreciate what he'd pulled off even more, as he mentioned some of the real-life inspirations for the novel.

I am interested in reading the articles that discuss the issues of race and appropriation; after all, this book is about Korean characters but was written by a white dude. (The issue was even more stark in Memoirs of a Geisha, which is also by a white guy, but in first person and from the point of view of a woman. I do love that book though, total guilty pleasure.) But apart from all of that, I recommend this book in a major, major way. It's amazing.

How Should a Person Be? (by Sheila Heti)

This was the love-it-or-hate-it book of the 2013 Tournament of Books (it knocked out Bring Up the Bodies in a big upset) and aych, the friend who leant it to me, hated it. Well I loved it. Loved it!

I understand why some people might not like it, might think it's too facile or McSweeney's or gimmicky, but I really loved it. It can be funny: "We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form. The 19th century, I know, was tops for the novel." It can be profound: "One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can’t be happy, let them at least be unhappy—really, really unhappy for once, and then they might truly be human." 

I just loved Heti's writing, I thought it was original and energetic. If it came down to this or Building Stories in my own personal 2013 Tournament of Books, I might pick this one too. (But I wouldn't expect anyone to agree with me.)

Bring Up the Bodies (by Hillary Mantel)

A little late for the Tournament of Books, but I just finished the sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies. This one essentially covers the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn from Thomas Cromwell's point of view, with Mantel's characteristic attention to dialogue, detail, and metaphor, and with Cromwell being as inscrutable and ambiguous as ever.

I would not have read it if someone hadn't told me that Mantel fixed the pronoun thing that drove me so crazy with Wolf Hall, and she did! There are a few awkward "he, Cromwell" constructions, but it's better than "he" just floating around by itself in the confusing way that it did in Wolf Hall. So this book is an easier read for sure.

It's also just as gripping as Wolf Hall if not more so, since we know Anne Boleyn is doomed, and we're waiting to see how it happens. Mantel does ascribe a strange motive to Cromwell (which is that he's getting revenge on five men specifically for a play they were in years ago) which apparently does not square with history.  I also feel that whole section of the trial and arrests and so forth is somewhat rushed, and I don't get a clear sense of the characters of some of the men. (That's probably my fault for not being aware of their names beforehand, as I'm sure they're mentioned throughout in nicely subtle dramatically ironic style.)

Mantel doesn't really take sides on whether Anne Boleyn was guilty or not, which I think is done well. (I've read some complaints from the pro-Anne contingent, but I think Anne is nicely ambiguous and not unsympathetic here.) As usual, this left me wanting to re-read Wives of Henry VIII, but this time I am also eagerly anticipating the third book in the trilogy. Bring on Jane Seymour! Bring on Anna of Cleves!

Building Stories (by Chris Ware)

By far the best of the tournament books I've read so far, even though I've enjoyed all of them. But this book, a graphic novel, is incredible, and it's the first one that feels, to me, like a genuine literary achievement.

The hook of Building Stories is that it comes in a large board-game-sized box full of newspapers, comic books, pamphlets, even a game board. The pieces can be read in any order, and they tell the story of the inhabitants of a certain apartment building. (So the reading experience, where you learn some sketchy outlines and then fill in the blanks as you go, means you're building the stories. And it's also stories about a building. Double meaning! I see what you did there, Chris Ware.) This also means your experience of reading it will never quite match up with anyone else's, since whatever you start with informs the rest of your reading experience. After I opened the box, I grabbed one piece and aych grabbed another one, and we both had two totally different entry points. (She wanted to find out about one key event in the protagonist's life; I wanted to find out what happened to the bee.) Once you finish, you will immediately want to start over again from the beginning to catch everything you missed.

The main character is a woman with a disability (handled wonderfully) and body image issues and depression (ditto) who is not quite likeable, but somehow sympathetic in her utter realness. I am actually stunned that Chris Ware is a dude, because this female character is so complex and authentic, and she is definitely the main focus of the book. Well, her and the bee.

I've heard great things about The Round House, but will not be surprised if Building Stories makes it almost to the end of the tournament along with that one. The only downside is that it's expensive, and it doesn't really lend itself to Kindle or library lending. I've already got three people in line to read mine. Five stars!

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (by Maria Semple)

So I am (informally, because god knows I don't need another reading project) trying to read some of the 2013 Tournament of Books books. Several of them were on my to-read list anyway, because I've been hearing a lot about them.

This is a fun, quirky satire of Seattle's privileged class by one of the writers of Arrested Development. It's actually probably a spoiler to call it fun, since it wouldn't be so fun if Bernadette turned out to be dead, for example. It's somewhat epistolary, in that it's made up of a variety of letters, emails, memos, and whatnot, with some connective material supplied by our quasi-narrator, Bernadette's daughter Bee.

The characters are very well drawn, though I think there are some character shifts towards the end that feel a little implausible. For instance, evil Audrey Griffin's sudden change of heart about everything, or even Bernadette herself. I loved the emails between Bernadette and her virtual personal assistant. I loved all the Portlandia-esque loving satire of Seattle itself, especially in terms of the politics at Galer Street School. I found Bee very sympathetic. Overall this is a fast, fun read that I would recommend.

As a side note, this is the third of the Tournament of Books novels (along with Beautiful Ruins and Gone Girl) that I've found to be more fast and breezy, rather than hefty and "literary." Maybe it's just by comparison with The Recognitions, which is my other current book and is doorstopily, densely literary. This is not to dismiss their merit, because I think they're all good books, but just an observation.

Beautiful Ruins (by Jess Walter)

Came very highly recommended, both by friends and by end-of-the-year booklists. I was about 75% done with it and was thinking, wow, it's kind of amazing that this book is being treated as literary fiction. You would think it would be dismissed as "chicklit" since it is so easy to read and written by a woman and centers around a female character and her romantic life.

Except then I found out Jess Walter is a dude. Well, that explains that.

Setting aside the question of whether the book would have gotten the same reception if Walter was a woman, which I doubt, it is an engrossing and relatively quick read. It begins with the arrival of a dying American actress in a remote Italian town in the 60s, and moves back and forth through time to the present day, when we see how the characters' lives have been affected by the events of decades ago. The characters are great, the story is interesting, the incorporation of real Old Hollywood is clever, the prose is smooth and assured, and the ending is satisfying. What more can you ask for?

I think it's probably a little overpraised (I feel like I've seen it praised everywhere), but that doesn't mean it didn't get a big thumbs up from me.

Gone Girl (by Gillian Flynn)

Entertainment Weekly's incessant raves for this book, along with my friend Sony's endorsement that this was a good airplane read, finally wore me down. I got this on my Kindle for reading on vacation, and I spent a day when the power was out basically just reading it.

The plot: Nick's wife Amy disappears. Did he kill her? When we read Amy's diary, do we learn Important Things? Told in alternating Nick/Amy point of view, and the various plot strands and points of view do a nice job intersecting.

The good: a page-turner! Is nicely ambiguous. Features a pair of possibly unreliable narrators. Was hard to put down. The voices of Nick and Amy are well delineated and you can tell them apart for sure. Well written, definitely.

The less good: The ending. I will hide this to be super safe with spoilers, because you should avoid them and then just go read it. { It isn't that it's ambiguous, because I like ambiguity, it just seems to peter out somewhat and the final resolution seems super, super implausible. }

I will say if you like literary crime stuff along the lines of The Lovely Bones or suspense stuff like the non-boring middle part of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you will probably like this book. So read it and then tell me what you think of the ending.