The first round results for the Fiction & Poetry and Memoirs, Devotionals, & Spirituality brackets are in. Higher seeds mostly held serve, with one or two upsets to keep things interesting. Here’s the updated bracket for your office pools.
Results
Fiction & Poetry
Dante’s Divine Comedy (1) defeated The Collected Poetry of T.S. Eliot (16) 68-20. You knew this was a tough bracket when T.S. Eliot was the 16 seed!
In one of the closet matches of the tournament so far, Silence by Shusako Endo (9) overcame Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (8) 31-27.
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (5) downed Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor (12) 70-35.
It was The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (4) with a 74-47 win over The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (13).
Paradise Lost by John Milton (6) easily defeated The Temple by George Herbert (11) 77-8. Many analysts (okay, one analyst —me) expected this to be much closer.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (14) fell to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (3) 95-16, setting up an epic Milton-Hugo showdown in the second round.
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose by John Donne (7) won 50-24 over Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Complete Poems (10).
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (2) dominated The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (15) 108-10.
Memoirs, Devotionals, & Spirituality
Despite the strongest showing of any 16 seed, Brennan Manning’s Ragamuffin Gospel (16) lost to Augustine’s Confessions (1) 86-22. Augustine has three books competing in the second round (Confessions, City of God, On Christian Teaching), while C.S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer each have two.
Oswald Chamber’s My Utmost for His Highest (8) defeated Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (9) 62-31.
In a pairing of two Catholic classics, Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola (5) held off Simone Weil’s Waiting for God (12) 54-13.
The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence (4) overcame The Life of St. Francis by Bonaventure (13) 67-13 in a mighty monastic match-up.
In the biggest upset of the day, Revelations of Love by Julian of Norwich (11) defeated Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (6) 41-19.
Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son (3) beat The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila (14) 49-25.
The Dark Night of the Cross by John of the Cross (7) won 51-33 over Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place (10).
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas á Kempis (2) defeated Born Again by Charles Colson (15) 82-7.
The former Associate Director for the Emerging Scholars Network, Micheal lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three children and works as a web manager for a national storage and organization company. He writes about work, vocation, and finding meaning in what you do at No Small Actors.
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