The Morning News Tournament of Books is back, with 16 books set to square off bracket-style starting March 7.

There is an honest-to-God crime fiction novel among the picks, though I guarantee Laura Lippman's fine novel, What the Dead Know, will be tagged with the phrase "transcends the genre."

Who will win? My money is on National Book Award winner Denis Johnson. I haven't waded through his tome yet, but plan to the next time I have several days of uninterrupted reading time ahead of me... or after my sons graduate high school, whichever comes first.

I've read four of this year's picks thus far, and in addition to Lippman's gripping read, I can attest that Joshua Ferris's book is good but not a book of the year contender, Ian McEwan's book was perfectly fine but far from perfect, and Jonathan Lethem's book was a dreadful stumble by an otherwise wildly talented writer.

The tournament is fairly simple. Books are paired up in brackets, with a different judge for each pairing. The judge picks a winner, and that book moves on until there is only one. The three previous winners are David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

This year's contenders are:

Run by Ann Patchett
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Petropolis by Anya Ulinich
Ovenman by Jeff Parker
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
New England White by Stephen L. Carter
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

Labels: books, criticism