It seems to me that in just about every round of the tournament the judges have expressed some frustration about being forced to compare two such disparate books. Is there some way of addressing this more directly in the brackets next year? Or are literary judges by nature too genial and afraid of hurting another author's feelings? I wonder if the judges for the Turner Prize have the same frustrations. Just thinking aloud here.

I mean, yes, on one level it'll be strange to have Frankie competing against City of Refuge, and in a sense any comparisons are meaningless. But it's also SUPER FUN to compare them and see what happens, right? I mean that's why we're all here: it's fun to think about books.

Hell yes. I know I'm having fun. I want to know if someone doesn't like a book, or does like a book, and I want to know why. The thinking that Kfan's talking about—all the messy figuring out of why a book moves you or bores you to tears, I've always thought that was the best part about the Rooster, that judges say why—for their messed-up, totally biased, personal reasons—one book worked for them and one didn't.

Frankly I wish Junot Díaz had gone on more about his thoughts on these books, from the writer's perspective. I mean, he fucking wrote Oscar Wao, an unbelievably good book—so how did the process of writing that, for example, influence how he read these two books? That's the kind of stuff I wish the Rooster judges gave us more of.

Taking off from Michael F.'s point, I think the essential silliness of any given decision is leavened somewhat by the quantity of those decisions. Whatever book wins the Rooster has accumulated the "messed-up, totally biased, personal reasons" of several judges. In this way, the ToB does mirror the basketball tournament that inspired it. Whatever team wins it might have been beaten by an opponent they didn't even play, but might have if the brackets fell a different way -- but winning the six games in a row is feat enough to deserve the "champ" label.

Tangentially, I'm really surprised at the level of love for City of Refuge in this tourney. I haven't read it, but that's partly because the very mixed reviews I read at the time of publication were pretty convincing.

I'm a hundred percent with the "this is supposed to be fun, remember?" crowd. Anybody who takes this kind of Tournament Of Subjective Responses too seriously is really missing the point. The point is to have a lively discussion about books we have read, and books we want to read. The key there is "have read" and "want to read." There is no point in people dumping on books they haven't even read, no matter what the genre or reviews were. Those who think "Dart League" sounds too lightweight because of its topic, or who dismiss "City Or Refuge" because they read a bad review of it, or they mistake it for a nonfiction book, or throw out "Landau-Banks" because it is labeled "young adult," without having read the books in question, are, I think out of the spirit of this tournament.

And I must do a little goal-tending, here, for City Of Refuge (which I personally bet on to win), specifically in response to John Williams and Richard Franco, above. To John W --the novel did get a horrible review in the NYTBR, but it was also a best book of the year for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Christian Science Monitor. Google it and you'll see. It got favorable reviews in the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, almost every other place than the NYTBR that I saw at least, as well as receiving blurbs from Mary Gaitskill, Richard Ford, and a bunch of other writers I respect.... Maybe the blurbs and the good reviews don't matter any more than the negative review. I don't know, but there is no replacement for reading a book before you form an opinion of it.

And to Richard F -- The Great Deluge is a very good history of the week immediately following Hurricane Katrina. I read it - I'm a New Orleans lover - it is compelling, and full of factual errors, and a very good book nonetheless, believe it or not. City Of Refuge covers a period of six months, and is a NOVEL. The thing that surprises me is that so few of the 'reader responses' here discuss it as a novel, which is what it is. Novels, I think, do different kinds of things than nonfiction accounts. Somebody in one of the responses mentioned Dan Baum's Nine Lives. Good book, absolutely. But it is not a novel, and it doesn't try to do the things a novel tries to do. City of Refuge does do those things. People are divided about how well the book does them, but obviously the judges are responding to it as more than just a documentary tearjerker about a disaster.

Anyway. I ran into all this after Moby-Dick was published. People read it as a book about a whale chase. Bastards. We didn't even have a "young adult" category then, or they would have probably tried to publish it as an Adventure Story For Teens. The Disreputable History of Stubb and Starbuck. I had to take a horrible day job to support me while I wrote what I still consider my masterpiece, Pierre, or The Ambiguities. The original title was Pierre, Ambiguous, but I anticipated exactly the kind of resistance that David Rees expressed about Mark Sarvas' title, and I changed it in galleys. In any case, some people form strong opinions about things of which they have no experience; I would prefer not to.

Picking up where Richard Franco left off, I think it would be great to see a companion competition for works of non-fiction. Think of a Malcolm Gladwell up against a Tom Friedman...or a sportswriter against a historian. It's as equally arbitrary as the ToB, yet I would suspect just as oddly fascinating. Perhaps it could be done in the fall and mock the college football bowl system. Just a thought...

@ Matt:

I heartily second the idea of a non-fiction Rooster. Great idea.

@ John about "Fandom":

You bring up a really interesting point here that I don't see literary circles talk about much, in snide tones. Like, for example, Stephen King and John Grisham and, oh, say, Richard Paul Evans have "fans" but more literary or hoity-toity writers have groups or schools of people: Nabokov has Nabokovians, Joyce has Joyceans, Faulkner has scholars and excited but confused readers, denizens of Yoknapatawpha County, etc.

Full Disclosure: I'm a Stephen King and (early) John Grisham fan, a part-time denizen of Yoknapatawpha county, and a rabid Nabokovian. My feelings for first three writers vary -- I love their good stuff, am totally indifferent to their mediocre and bad stuff, and was totally outraged (threw the book across the room) by Grisham's novel of about four years ago, where in the book's final chapter he fumbles awkwardly for the readers tear-ducts -- but I don't know if that's Rolling Stone's like fandom. As to which, Van Halen is probably my Rolling Stones, and I just couldn't give less of a shit about Van Halen these days, even though I LOVE their early stuff. (Maybe as a Gen-X-er, product of divorce and '80s-whatnot, I'm not capable of full emotional investment.)

Yet in the case of Nabokov, I find that I've become all kinds of subjective. Like, I'll read just about anything he's attached his name to. I'd allow myself to be adopted by him. My fandom has shaded into this weird kind of quasi-emotional/familial type relationship, and I'm not entirely sure what that's about. Yet, it's more than a psychological phenomenon, I think. That is, scholars, many scholars, will attest to Nabokov's writerly cred. He is objectively good. On the other hand, many readers claim that N's stuff is too cerebral and emotionally cold, and thus not capable of engaging the reader's soul -- which the writing is, if you don't know how to read it; but if you know how to read it, you'll find amazing depths of real emotion, pockets of ecstasy. So, in sum, I have this giddy school-girl like attachment to Nabokov's writing, on the one hand, but on the other hand, I can also point to scholars, etc., who lend support to Nabokov as an objectively Important Writer. He's no Rolling Stones. Or, better said, he's both Rolling Stones and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Having read nothing of Bolano or Bolano scholarship, I don't have the faintest idea where he fits on the continuum. Is he a Stephen King or a John Grisham, a writer who has "fans" but little or no critical support, or is he a Nabokov, a Joyce, a Faulkner, a Hemingway? Is Bolano's readers' partisanship mere "fandom" or is it a sign of objectively good taste? Is it a blend of both; i.e., fandom and good taste? Does it matter?

That's what I love about the Rooster. It combines the raucous, partisan Animal House glee of pure fandom with at least some rationalization, some scholarship, some attempts at explication.

Here's a quick prediction for 2010's Rooster: if Nabokov's /Original of Laura/ (scheduled for Fall 2009 publication) makes it, you're in for a passionate, heated fan/scholar v. non-fan/non-scholar match up that will (I hope) put /2666/'s dust-up to shame.

Prediction for 2011's Rooster: if David Foster Wallace's /Pale King/ makes its Spring 2010 publication date, and if /PK/ makes the 2011 Rooster, then you'll see the whole fan/scholar v. non-fan/non-scholar thing go nuclear.

Or not.

2 things:

1) Whoever wins, John Hodgman owns this year's tourney and deserves his own Rooster.

2) i would totally love to see Frankie go up against 2666. Eli-the-Swedish-vampire-girl vs Godzilla (the man-in-the-floppy-rubber-suit one, not the rubbish CGI one)! Zombiepocalypse!

Bonus 'thing': Somehow, so far, this year's tourney has been not as fun as last year's.

Bring back the fun.

What's up with the hostility, Junot Diaz?