The 2013 Tournament of Books starts on Monday, and the brackets were announced yesterday. There’s a great tournament diagram available for download, but rather than try to figure out how to fill it in electronically so it was legible, I generated a traditional bracket-style diagram with my picks filled out (at the bottom of the post).

The diagram creation script I wrote last year doesn’t include a pre-round bracket, used this year to decide between Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (my pick), Fobbit, and Yellow Birds, so I just filled in the obvious (to me!) choice in the top spot of the first round.

The first round presents some challenges for the judges. I’ll be interested in the contest between Bring Up the Bodies and HHhH both of which are historical fiction and were very good. Mantel’s previous book in the story of Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall) won the Tournament in 2009, and Bodies is as good as that book. But HHhH is an creative and entertaining mix of semi-fiction, history, and the author’s thoughts and concerns about the story / history he is writing. It’s a different style of book than what is typically in the Tournament (although more traditional that Building Stories, I suppose), and I wonder how it will compete against such an obvious favorite to win.

The Round House vs. The Fault In Our Stars and The Orphan Master’s Son vs. Where’d You Go, Bernedette are contests between excellent books that are completely different in tone and subject (Native American sexual assault and terminal cancer in adolescents / North Korean oppression and madcap antics from a stifled architectural genius). Instead of getting two pairings that are similar in the first round (like Bodies and HHhH) and then two very different books in the second, the different books will be competing against each other initially.

Although Billy Lynn has acheived some literary notariety and is the book I’d like to see win, I think the real heavyweights in the Tournament are Gone Girl and Bring Up the Bodies. I expect to see these two go far, maybe to the final round.

Finally, will there be another book that goes deep into the Tournament that I really didn’t like (like Lightning Rods last year)? I didn’t even try to read Dear Life, couldn’t finish Ivyland, and didn’t enjoy How Should a Person Be? I’m hoping for round one elimination for these books.

Get your diagrams ready and start reading the results on Monday!