Three Percent #32: Everybody Loves a Bracket

With the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament getting underway this afternoon (I refuse to acknowledge the “First Four” games), Tom and I thought this would be a good time to talk about the fact that we both picked the exact same Final Four (Kentucky, Missouri, UNC, and Ohio State) and that The Morning News’s Tournament of Books is made up of a lot of mediocre books.

We also talk about the idea of a “Tournament of World Literature” featuring the best translated works of the 20th and 21st centuries. It’s kind of fun coming up with what books would be included in such a mythical tournament—Sartre’s Nausea, Cortazar’s Hopscotch, Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Perec’s Life, a User’s Manual, so on and forth—and trying to figure out how to seed these. I am pretty serious about trying to bracket this out, so if you have any suggestions of books that just have to be included, send me an email (chad.post [at] rochester.edu), or post them in the comments below.

This week’s music is Regina Spektor’s totally kick-ass new single, All the Rowboats. I heard this on a recent episode of NPR’s “All Songs Considered,” and it totally blew me away . . .

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