Bracket-mad readers are currently participating in the DABWAHA (Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors) tournament for romance novels, the BSCreview (BookSpot Central) competition for science fiction and fantasy books, and a match dedicated to selecting the world's favorite fictional detective.
The grandaddy of them all, however, is the Tournament of Books,mounted by the Morning News Web site and now in its sixth year. Unlike DABWAHA, ToB doesn't offer prizes to readers who make the most accurate predictions, and unlike all the other contests, it doesn't rely on polling readers to determine the winning books. Instead, a single guest judge selects the victor in each bracket, while the tournament's overseers, Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, serve up commentary garnished with the occasional dab of sportscaster lingo ("quintuple toe loop"?). There's even an official statistician who crunches such questionably significant numbers as (I think I have this right) the ratio of an entry's length to its likeliness to ascend to the next round.
:>)
No comments:
Post a Comment