The 2023 Championship
The 2023 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 31 • CHAMPIONSHIP
The Book of Goose
v. Babel
In the championship match, all of this year’s judges read both finalists, vote for one to win, and briefly tell us how they made their choice. Here are their verdicts.
Ahsan Butt
I read both swiftly. Though The Book of Goose, which is spare, each stroke exact yet shifty like a trick of light, did not captivate so much as prime me, until it could, in its final moments, wreck me. Babel was engrossing until it was pummeling. Audacious, uneven, repetitive, often didactic, but affecting and absolutely ingeniously conceived. A harsh tale about the fictions we tell to veil the “untamable forces” we suppress versus a leftist, anticolonial polemic translated into a fantastical secret history. Novels like Goose—unsentimental and withholding, designed to conceal as much as they reveal—I lean toward. Yet there is Babel. Loud. Thrumming with too-muchness. If the excess and totality of its postcolonial critique weren’t so thrilling, maybe I’d be able to resist it.
The Book of Goose 0 ⏤ Babel 1
Nicola Twilley
My winner out of Babel and The Book of Goose is—surprise, surprise—The Book of Goose. Babel’s premise is so ingenious, it will stick with me forever, but The Book of Goose swallowed me whole into the intensity of its world, and that’s what I want from a novel. It’s so delicate and dream-like in some ways and so harsh and spare in others, and, most importantly, it gave me space to wonder what it all means, rather than telling me. I loved it.
The Book of Goose 1 ⏤ Babel 1
Nathan Deuel
Tediously conjured from a mountain of research, featuring stiff central characters whose bland agonies distract from a molten core, Babel squanders several fresh and stirring ideas about language and power. Meanwhile, there’s the deft and sly work of Book of Goose, a sharp and breathtaking portrait of young women in love—with each other, with the world, with every moment they aren’t being bossed around by the (mostly) much less interesting (mostly male) humans in power. I’d argue there’s more richness and surprise in a single three-page scene from Goose about oppression’s madness and melancholy than in all of the sprawling, scholarship-driven revenge fantasy of Babel. Congrats to a rangy badass on being a cool rebel; a-plus striver seeking extra credit, please chill.
The Book of Goose 2 ⏤ Babel 1
M.L. Kejera
Both Babel and The Book of Goose are reflective of the authors’ lives. Both are about the class appeal of elite education in an oppressive European setting. Both use italics when translating into English. Both make frequent uses of digressions, Babel’s found in footnotes and Goose’s in parentheticals. Both make use of the epistolary form. Both are historical fiction, with Babel’s alternative history featuring actual people from the past. But history is the study of patterns. Only Babel intricately shows how to break the pattern of empire, which resonated with me, and likely many others, in this moment.
The Book of Goose 2 ⏤ Babel 2
Calvin Kasulke
Counterintuitively, I found Babel almost cozy. For all the fireworks on the page, I felt I knew where we were headed—in a general sense—as sure as I know the detective in a murder mystery will solve the case. But The Book of Goose was unpredictable line by line and beat by beat, shifting its rhythms and creating diversions to distract the reader from the inevitable. Li’s mastery of the page had me reading Goose with such an expression of incredulity that by the end of it, the muscles on my face were actually sore.
The Book of Goose 3 ⏤ Babel 2
Adam Dalva
A tricky final round. Babel is ambitious, complicated, and brilliantly textured. I’m a newfound admirer of Kuang’s work and am especially glad to have read this for its complex treatment of translation—count me in for more dark academia! And Li is a master. Though it took me a bit of time to fully connect with The Book of Goose’s narrative, the lyric prose stood out right away, and then passive Agnès and bold Fabienne’s implausible folie à deux hooked me in. Goose’s narrative surrealism is quieter than Babel’s irrealism, but it’s wonderful. And so: Give the goose a rooster!
The Book of Goose 4 ⏤ Babel 2
Olivia Waite
The Book of Goose is a butcher’s book, knife-sharp and indifferent to the pain of mere flesh as it dissects and separates its characters into consumable pieces. Babel seems more welcoming: It makes gracious room for the reader—sets up a chair, pats the cushion, invites us to sit—and then explodes with a violence that makes indifference impossible. And I always want from books what Szymborska’s stone called “a sense of taking part.” Goose impressed me, but Babel left its gunpowder fingerprints on my throat.
The Book of Goose 4 ⏤ Babel 3
Torsa Ghosal
If I were at a bookstore, I would gravitate toward getting a copy of The Book of Goose over Babel, enticed by the possibility of being drawn into the mind games of two friends and the quiet ferocity of Yiyun Li’s prose. And the turbulent relationship of Agnès and Fabienne engaged me in all the ways I would have expected. However, I was surprised by the pull of R.F. Kuang’s Babel over me. Babel is an intelligent, ambitious novel about the relationship of language with imperialism and power. I must admit I turned the pages of Babel more swiftly than those of The Book of Goose. In the end, though, I vote for The Book of Goose because its representation of life, loss, and self-invention moved me. It is the kind of novel to which I can imagine returning over and over.
The Book of Goose 5 ⏤ Babel 3
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Aminah Mae Safi
What does revenge look like? And, if we should achieve it, how would we be twisted by our own desire to mete out just punishment? Perhaps The Book of the Goose and Babel are about grief. Loss. The unexpressed rage of what it is to assimilate rather than speak your own words in your own tongue. The swallowed anger of being in a girl where girls are docile, obedient things. I'm equally pulled by both ideas and all such feelings. But my own love of arcane history, etymology, and magic eke ahead here.
The Book of Goose 5 ⏤ Babel 4
A. Cerisse Cohen
Damn, I loved both! Some similarities: Each celebrates complicated friendships and features a young prodigy who rebels against the villainous “educator” who whisked them to England. Babel is brilliant, especially on the corrosive, pervasive effects of imperialism and the connections between language and power. It can also be didactic and often made me want to turn to a history, essay, or translation theory. The Book of Goose does what I think only fiction can do. It filtered experience through language, generating meaning (especially regarding death and literature) via strange narration that embraced ambiguity and captivated this reader, page after page.
The Book of Goose 6 ⏤ Babel 4
Summer Farah
There is much to appreciate about Babel. Although it is a tome, each page counts—the world is vibrant, thorough, rich with research and intention. The Book of Goose was a book I read in my first round, and the book I chose to move forward; the intimacy of address still hooked me wholeheartedly on this second read several months later.
The Book of Goose 7 ⏤ Babel 4
Christina Orlando
I knew Babel was going to be big and impactful from the moment its book deal was announced, and it did not disappoint. Centering the darkness of scholarship and academia as an institution, Babel does the anti-colonial work that so many books claim and fail to achieve. Kuang’s brilliance shines in this sweeping narrative and its footnotes, using magic of language to critique all the ways empires steal from other cultures and whiteness homogenizes them. For me, there is no other book. Babel claimed my heart and hasn’t yet let go.
The Book of Goose 7 ⏤ Babel 5
Xuan Juiliana Wang
The Book of the Goose tormented me, like the memory of some regrettable thing I said in high school that I’ve still yet to find funny. Reading it felt like singing a hopeless karaoke love song. From the beginning, the reader is told that neither of these friends will find the kind of happiness they so wanted as children, but to experience their uneasy love for each other on their path to leaving one another is still a sad pleasure.
The Book of Goose 8 ⏤ Babel 5
Abayomi Animashaun
The Book of Goose is among the best novels I've read this year. It’s polished and its examination of the gilded prison is superb! Yet, I find myself drawn to Babel for its scope, scholarship, and unabashed reliance on etymologies and translation theory.
The Book of Goose 8 ⏤ Babel 6
Santiago Sanchez
Babel deserves its flowers. It was entertaining to follow a Harry Potter-esque cast of students take on their beguiling, powerful school, but ultimately the heavy handedness of Kuang’s approach to racism and colonial exploitation felt a little cookie-cutter and self-conscious. It’s the kind of fiercely political book I could see my students really loving; I’ve already recommended it to a few. But ultimately, a short book committed to emotionally remembering the past is the quickest way to my heart. Throw in a complicated friendship and you’ve got me by my hair. The Book of Goose isn’t trying to appeal to everyone; I’ve been surprised to see it on so few awards lists. But its attention to ambivalence and discomfort, to what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings,” is exactly what makes this book my winner.
The Book of Goose 9 ⏤ Babel 6
Katy Waldman
Babel is so charismatic! I love its premise—magic generated by word meanings that slip between the cracks of translation—and its deep thoughtfulness about how the strands of language, power, and empire can both merge and come apart. The Book of Goose, though, is also a continent-spanning adventure, a study of individuals swept up in history, and one further elevated by psychological acuity and tonal clarity. Personally, as a twin, I can’t resist a complicated, doubled girl-bildungsroman.
The Book of Goose 10 ⏤ Babel 6
Lauren Markham
What an impossible, delightful pairing. These books couldn't be more different, and thus considered next to one another offer a dazzling reminder that a book, and a great book, can take so many different forms. Babel is a hurtling epic—a stunningly imagined world defined by the interplay of language, profit, and power. The Book of Goose is the smoldering story of friendship, with language so liquid and dialogue so surprising that something on nearly every page took my breath away. Ultimately, it was The Book of Goose that twisted deeper hooks beneath my skin.
The Book of Goose 11 ⏤ Babel 6
This year’s champion:
The Book of Goose
Match Commentary
with the Tournament of Books Staff
Andrew Womack: And there we have it! Congratulations to Babel on its comeback and to The Book of Goose for taking home the 2023 Rooster. Thank you to all our judges for the past month of thoughtful renderings and nail-biting judgments—as ever, it’s been a wild and wooly month of literary bloodsport.
Rosecrans Baldwin: As is custom here, we reached out to our champion’s author, Yiyun Li, to see if they’d enjoy a live rooster to wreak havoc in their home. Li declined the offer for some reason—we’ll make a donation to a literacy charity instead in Goose’s name—but had this to say: “What honkingly delightful news that The Book of Goose has won the only March Madness that matters to bookish spectators. Thank you for this honor.”
Andrew: Truly, you mess with the honk and you get the bonk.
Along with today’s result, we have also randomly selected our two winners of our Contest of the Commentariat, where we asked you to correctly guess this year’s champion and final score. Our winners are Ryan and foggylemon! Please email your mailing address and contact info to talk@themorningnews.org to receive your gift subscription from our amazing presenting sponsor, Field Notes, and a gift card from Brooklyn’s wonderful Books Are Magic stores!
Rosecrans: And thanks again to Books Are Magic for sponsoring last week’s live event. It was great to gather so many folks in one room, even if the room was Zoom. The video should be posted soon to their YouTube channel for anybody who missed out.
Andrew: Before handing things over to our official ToB commentators, we want to thank Field Notes for again sponsoring this year’s Tournament of Books. Make sure to check out their new “Streetscapes” collection of sketch books featuring cover illustrations by Steve McDonald of Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. Really stunning stuff.
Thank you also to our Sustaining Members, who make the Tournament of Books possible, month in and month out, because really, this event actually begins long before March and ends long after—actually wait, at this point it never ends, right?
Rosecrans: It does not!
Andrew: And that’s thanks to our Sustaining Members! Please consider joining them to help ensure the future of the Tournament of Books. (Plus you’ll get 50 percent off everything at our store.)
Rosecrans: Now, official ToB commentators, what say you about our finale?
Meave Gallagher: Thank you Judges Kejera, Safi, and Orlando for articulating some of what I so loved about Babel. I’m glad our judges were moved by these works. But, not to be clever, it seemed like many of them were reading in a different language than me.
Babel begins with the protagonist losing his own name to imperialism’s casual dismissiveness; it offers the possibility of solidarity between classes and identities without minimizing the struggle to achieve it; and in its denouement finally allows the protagonist to reclaim his name—while still keeping it from the reader, forcing us to consider again our complicity in the system that took it from him. What a gorgeous fuck you. Babel inspired me, chastened me, gave voice to my own pain and shame and hope. Plus, all those footnotes giving the precise logograms for the pinyin? The nerve! The irony! Kuang isn’t just “in conversation with” novelists and scholars, she’s making art for and giving voice to people those novelists and scholars have been very comfortable ignoring for a very long time.
A better comparison of unflinchingly political art than certain cruel, derivative, neoliberal pablum: Laura Poitras and Nan Goldin’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, nakedly ideological and tear-your-heart-out beautiful. This year, I wanted the howl, the scream, the big risks. The Book of Goose spoke to personal heartbreaks; Babel took on the world.
Kevin Guilfoile: Years ago, writing elsewhere about a different book (the name of which I will not mention because its invocation has become something of a meta-commentary cliché in these parts) I made an observation about my own kids. I noticed that many children seem to have an almost infinite capacity for happiness, and a limited capacity for sadness. They get sad, but you can often make that sadness disappear by just reminding them of something that makes them happy. Adults on the other hand seem to have an infinite capacity for sadness, and their happiness is often fleeting. Judge Wang points out that The Book of Goose is, on one level, an engrossing exploration of that idea (“From the beginning the reader is told that neither of these friends will find the happiness they so wanted as children…”)
I’ve also had a related thought: that my adult reading is often an attempt to recapture the joy I felt getting lost in a book as a child. I don’t think I’m capable of having that exact feeling again, but I’ll often read a novel that gives me access to that sense memory, transporting me to a rainy day in a big rocking chair, immersed in The Lord of the Rings or The Pushcart War or Bob Fulton’s Amazing Soda Pop Stretcher, or any one of the countess books that made me into a lifelong reader. Babel was that kind of book for me.
In that way, a perfect pairing.
Alana Mohamed: To me, both Babel and The Book of Goose both feel weirdly of-the-moment for historically set novels—one jam-packed with information and rabbit holes, the other hyper-personal and self-aware—so it’s interesting to see the judges view them so differently. Both share an awareness of the alchemical nature of words, colonization by British society, and the toll it takes on a soul when the two meet. The popular opinion here seems to be that Babel was less intimate than The Book of Goose, but I’d say that the central struggle of Babel is also a deeply personal one, of self-recognition and determination. It certainly felt personal to me, as someone who thinks about how her own family’s American Dream is predicated on cycles of oppression. I definitely see how the winking (blinking? flashing?) footnotes get to be a bit much 500 pages in, but it was a joy to read a book so confident in what it was trying to execute.
Regardless, it seems like melancholy is the mood of the moment—and who can blame ’em? Meave and I have spent quite a chunk of time doom-moaning about the ills of the world. Li is able to immerse us in desolation and longing, tempered by the only balms we’re allowed: the bravery of children and the beauty of a well-sharpened word.
Meave: Alana reminds me to remind you all to help save the world for, if not us, then the babies, who should all have the freedom to choose to read about stymied friendships and emotional and literal explosions and the importance of finding and using their own voices—values, as noted, both books share. So again: Use your library! Get involved in For the People! Or whatever group speaks most to your passions. If we don’t take action, we’ve already lost. And it’s not us who are going to suffer the way future generations will.
John Warner: A fairly comfortable tally for Book of Goose, but reading through the judgments, we see a number of close calls that ultimately tipped toward the victor. Babel was a book I never would’ve picked up without the Tournament, but was hugely happy to be introduced to it and its author. I’m unsurprised to see such a strong final showing. The Book of Goose was a book I didn’t read until it was already marching through the competition, but had I finished it prior to the start it would’ve been my personal favorite for its ability to slip under my skin and work away at my consciousness in ways I can’t even articulate.
Meave: My immense gratitude to Alana, a partner in commentary par excellence, and Rosecrans and Andrew for their kindness and support and ruthless editing. John and Kevin, you were cooking with induction burners this year—what a challenge, what a treat. Commentariat, you, as ever, impress and confound. Thanks for coming back and driving me bananas another year. Please consider @ing me below with books suggestions for the 2024 Tournament—the weirder, the wilder, the less expected the better. Let’s keep challenging these esteemed judges. Let’s keep one another on our reading toes.
Kevin: For almost two decades, John and I have been the Agnèses of this operation: We have been the forward-facing voices of the ToB, but calligraphers in reality, while the vast majority of the work has been done by our incredible Fabiennes—Andrew, Rosecrans, and Meave. Like Fabienne, they are morally suspect (have we not talked about the throwaway sentence in The Book of Goose when Agnès implies that she and Fabienne manslaughtered a kid?), but it is their imagination and hard work that has made this thing as lasting as it is. Many thanks to them and to Alana, who has been just great, and all the judges. It takes so many people to make a Rooster happen and after all this time I can’t imagine a year without it.
Alana: And though I’ll admit I am terrified of reading the comments, wow, the thoughtfulness of the Commentariat astounds. I thought, “How lucky is it that a space like the ToB exists?” before realizing that might not be luck but the hard work of all involved. Thanks to everyone for making this the highlight of my March.
John: For those who tuned in for the live Books Are Magic Zoom event, my final thoughts will be redundant, but at the end of every Tournament, I’m always amazed at how it never feels (to me), like we’re repeating ourselves—even though I often repeat myself. Much of this is owed to bringing new voices into the mix—like Alana this year—and the ongoing dynamism of the Commentariat, but I also think it’s really just a testament to how gathering folks around a shared interest and letting them be human inevitably results in something interesting and new, even as the structure of the event is largely unchanged.
Professionally, I’ve spent the bulk of the last several months opining and consulting on the potential impacts of AI on how we teach writing and what kinds of work is most meaningful, and I see the ToB as an object lesson that humans truly are not replaceable, that the unique set of books that arrive each year are an inexhaustible fuel for exploring our own individual and collective fascinations.
In other words, it’s been fun, as always, and a million thanks to everyone who makes the fun possible.
Andrew: Thank you, esteemed Tournament commentators! Rooster fans: We’ll be back with more news about more events before you know it. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Rooster newsletter to find out what’s what, and when.
Rosecrans: The 19th Tournament of Books is a wrap. What will our 20th look like? We’ll find out soon!
Today’s mascot
Our final mascot of the Tournament, brought to us by Commentariat member Matthew E., is the beautiful Powell! “Powell is a rescue from a box on a roadside somewhere in Arizona,” Matthew said. “She’s weird. She barks at walls, then acts ashamed about it. She has to wear a muzzle like Hannibal Lecter any time we send her outside because she eats strange somethings that give her the runs. She hates the cat, but she is also scared of the cat. Her two redeeming features: she’s very sweet and very photogenic.” We think she’s lovely! Matthew added that Powell’s favorite author is Jack Kerouac because he wrote her favorite book, On the Road, “which is where we found her." Welcome, Powell.
And a big thank you to all of our mascots and their human companions—we delighted in your presence. Mascots may become a permanent part of future ToBs! (And thank you again to The Tennis Podcast for the idea.)
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