Tournament of Books discussion
2026 ToB
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Flesh
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Bretnie
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Dec 11, 2025 03:36PM
Space to discuss the 2026 TOB contender Flesh by David Szalay.
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If I start with Flesh, the rest of my TOB reads will be better. I started this when it won the Booker, before the shortie was published. I would have quit early on if my other audiobook holds had come through sooner, and I now I wish I'd just quit and listened to music for a few days. I never liked the main character, I didn't like the writing style, I actively hated the dialogue ("Ok. I don't know. Yeah.") I truly don't understand how it won the Booker. Maybe the TOB will enlighten me via the people who actually liked it.
Just DNFed this this morning and it was so freeing. Pretty bad!
I liked it, but I'm not going to argue for it. As a mediocre, fail-up man, it resonated is about all I got in defense. I'm also surprised it won the Booker.
I liked this one, but I hated most of the characters. Even without liking the characters, I was still invested in the story and eager to see what happened to them. I guess I liked how refreshing it was to have a unique protagonist-someone who was so passive. I ended up reading this one quickly. The prose skims along at nice pace.
I really liked it though I did not like the MC. I found the style of the book, the passivity of the MC and the things that happened matched each other. Also I found it refreshing to have a MC that didn’t try to a) look perfect b) look very bad. And IMHO the writing was excellent.
I didn't care for it. I didn't care for the writing - saying "okay" over and over is not all that interesting. For me, it was exhausting even though it's not long, but I tend not to enjoy unengaging characters who never develop self-awareness or agency. It appears to be one of those polarizing books.
