Our Picks in the 2012 Tournament of Books

Last week Chris Hoyt handed around the brackets for the 2012 Tournament of Books. If you don’t know what that is, read this. Basically, ToB (a combined effort of The Morning News, Field Notes & Powell’s Books) pits the top novels of the previous year against one another in an NBA-style tournament bracket to determine the Winner. Individual judges each weigh two books at a time, eliminating titles one by one, until the end when they all get together to decide who wins the rooster.

Here are the titles in the running this year:

Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Teju Cole, Open City
Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time
Karen Russell, Swamplandia
Kate Zambreno, Green Girl

And here are our bookseller predictions:

Raul – Devil All the Time

Kester – Sense of an Ending

Michael – The Tiger’s Wife

Trevor – 1Q84

Robyn – Sense of an Ending

Clint – The Marriage Plot

Jenn S. – The Tiger’s Wife

Elizabeth – The Art of Fielding

Mandy – The Art of Fielding

Julie – The Art of Fielding

Alison – The Art of Fielding

Hoyt – The Art of Fielding (and in a second bracket, which may or may not be permissible in a court of bookselling, The Tiger’s Wife.)

Download your own bracket here. Let us know your picks.