MarysLibrary

2015 Buff Orpington Book List

Here is our list of the Sweet Sixteen for this year's Buff Orpington Book Tournament.

This is an informal tournament and a book is chosen for this list because it's being talked and written about everywhere or it's the first book by a new author or comes from a lesser-known publisher or one of us just happens to like it.

 

Rabih Alameddine: An Unnecessary Woman

Chris Bohjalian: Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

Nikolas Butler: Shotgun Lovesongs

Anthony Doerr: All the Light We Cannot See

Roddy Doyle: The Guts

Elinor Florence: Bird’s Eye View

Richard Ford: Let Me Be Frank with You

Rachel Joyce: Perfect

Karl Ove Knausgaard: My Struggle, Book 3

Chang-rae Lee: On Such a Full Sea

Ian McEwan: The Children Act

Marilynne Robinson: Lila

Jane Smiley: Some Luck

Colm Toibin: Nora Webster

Ayelet Waldman: Love and Treasure

Sarah Waters: The Paying Guests

The Buff Orpington Book Tournament

The Buff Orpington Book Tournament started in the spring of 2013 when Kilian Metcalf and I were grousing about Gone Girl winning some prize or other. Neither of us liked the book at all.

The BO is based on March Madness, once removed. I was following the March Madness-inspired online Morning News book tournament (the one with a rooster as a logo) and foolishly said something like, “We ought to start our own tournament.” Kilian jumped on it. And so we cobbled together the BO.

Kilian named it the Buff Orpington because we needed a name and the BO is a chicken and I have this chicken thing and the tournament that inspired ours has a rooster for a logo. So the hen is our logo.

That first year Kilian and I picked titles out of thin air and we scrambled for judges. You will perhaps recall we didn’t finish our report on the winners that first year until April some time.

Because it’s our party we run it the way we like. Kilian picks the books. Each of us gets a veto, which is seldom exercised, on titles that might otherwise make it to the longlist. And each of us gets to put a title on the shortlist that might not otherwise make it there, again a privilege not often exercised.

We go looking for little-known publishers and first-time authors but of course we don’t limit the contestants to those categories. There has been talk of seeding the titles next year -- mostly my idea, egged (sic) on by Judge Pamela Thomas It seems a shame to have the books that are the big favorites judged against one another in the first round.

I might add that judges are encouraged throughout the year to name titles that they think should be on the longlist and/or among the sweet 16. This year Judge Nancy Couto brought up The Unnecessary Woman, which might otherwise not have made it onto the shortlist.

There are no criteria for judging except that the judge liked one book better than another. There's no pretension to literary merit if the judge doesn’t want to address that issue, though some judges have done so and to great effect in past essays. But “I just didn’t like the author’s writing style,” or “I took a dislike to the major characters and couldn’t get past it,” are both valid decisions for choosing Title A over Title B in the BO.

I’m still stunned that so many people have been willing to be judges. (We have a waiting list!) I mean, at our age, to agree to have two loopy females assign us two novels to read, possibly titles and authors we’ve never heard of in genres we have spent a lifetime avoiding. And then to be assigned to write a book report by a certain deadline like this was 7^th grade!

So that’s the history of the BO. Kilian has the almost impossible task of reducing the million or so novels published in English in the past year to a mere 16. I throw together the schedules and collect the essays. The judges do the hard work, reading and thinking about and writing about the books in the contest.

Our first two winners were: Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues and Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. This year? I have my favorites but I can’t begin to guess which will win.

The 2015 Buff Orpington tournament will be getting underway soon. Starting early in March we will have a contest every day until on the 31st our championship round judge will announce the winner. 

I'll post the list of contenders soon.

Ash Wednesday

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice
            —from "Ash Wednesday" by T. S. Eliot

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan

West of Sunset is the long-awaited much-anticipated new novel by Stewart O'Nan. It's about the last years of F Scott Fitzgerald's life, 1937-1940, which he spends as a writer in Hollywood and during which he has an affair with Sheila Graham, actress and gossip columnist. It's a slow -- and sometimes fast -- slide into unquenchable thirst, desperation, and regret.

And at first I thought I wasn't going to like it, in part because of the name dropping: Bogie, Dottie Parker, Joan Crawford, etc. But after a while I realized I was reading a fictional story taking place entirely from the point of view of a fictional Fitzgerald and once given that, it was silly to complain because of course he knew all these people (Max, Ernest, Tom Wolfe) and they are important to the story, in part because their success made him sore.

Zelda and their daughter Scottie are all-important to him and make his life exceedingly difficult. He went to Hollywood ($1000 a week to write and re-write screenplays) to pay back his debts to his agent, Harold Ober. He manages to do this. But he has his daughter's tuition at Vassar to pay and his wife's medical bills, and then his own medical bills as he ends up in the hospital after a couple of particularly egregious benders.

Near the end of the book, and the end of his life, Fitzgerald managed to pull himself and his notes together and write his last novel, The Last Tycoon. The novel, while nearly completed, remained unfinished when he died in December of 1940 of a heart attack, age 44.

All of this is treated carefully and with great insight by O'Nan. I often wonder how a novelist makes his way into the minds of his characters so convincingly. How does Anthony Trollope commiserate so convincingly with a 28-year-old woman who has no alternative but marriage and who is becoming desperate to find a husband? How can Michael Chabon understand so well the longing of a New York City teenager to create super-hero comic books? Somehow O'Nan sees clearly how corroding regret and self-loathing can be to an alcoholic who believes his best work is behind him, who cannot satisfy his family, who cannot manage to keep a job, and who cannot keep away from alcohol.

The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey

History can be more dramatic and engaging than fiction. This history of the 9th duke of Rutland and the story of how he locked himself into five rooms in the servant's quarters of his family castle, Belvoir, is dramatic indeed.

Catherine Bailey, allowed into those rooms to research a history of the repercussions of World War I on rural communities, discovered that the papers she needed from 1914 were missing from the collection. The 9th duke had destroyed all of them beginning and ending on precise dates in that year.

Why? It took her a good deal of time and research to find records in other families' collections of papers and in government records to understand what the duke's mother had done and what he himself had done. He found in retrospect that their behavior was so reprehensible that felt he must eradicate the record entirely.

Fascinating.