2024 Battle of the Books
A book battle bracket to crown the best book club pick of 2024
I’m here to remind you, Unstacked is great gift for the book lover or wannabe reader in your life. It can be scheduled to arrive on any day you wish and I made a little gift card you can print out and wrap up.
It’s year seven of The Stacks Battle of the Books. What is that you ask? It is our annual March Madness style1 book bracket to crown the best Stacks book club pick from the year.
I don’t like to pick favorites, but I think this is one of the best slates of book club picks we’ve ever had on the show. All twelve books were ripe for discussion and a lot of them were as chaotic as a book club pick should be.
The battle of the books has easily become my favorite annual tradition we do at The Stacks. We did it in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 and now 2024 steps to the plate2.
In addition to crowning a best book club pick you also get to fill out your own predictions for who will win and if you’re right you’ll win a TSBC book!
To enter fill out a bracket at Challonge. You create your account put your predictions3 in for who you think will win. Then on The Stacks Instagram Stories, you’ll vote (starting 12/23) for your favorite books in head to head battles, until we crown one winner, The Stacks Book Club Book of the Year. The results of each round will be updated over on Challonge (our bracket site) and on our Instagram @thestackspod.
You have until Friday, December 23rd at 6:00am PST to put in your predictions. Be sure your bracket name is your IG handle, email, or name, so you are easy to find upon completion of the tournament. We will announce the winner of the tournament and the winner of the giveaway on Tuesday, December 31st once all the results are in.
Here is the important stuff.
Make sure you’re following The Stacks on Instagram @thestackspod.
Register for the bracket if you want to be part of the giveaway CLICK HERE. Be sure to pick a winner at the bottom of the page4.
Vote in each round on our Insta Stories, starting Friday December 23rd . All voting on Instagram!
Voting begins the morning of Friday December 23rd for the first round, and will follow the schedule below.
Round 1 – December 23rd – Play in Games
Round 2 – December 26th – Elite 8
Round 3 – December 28th – Final 4
Round 4 – December 30th – Championship
That feels like a lot, trust me, it’ll be fun and worth it. Get started now.
Now for all the nerds…
Below are the gory details of how the seeding was figured out. I came up with my own calculations to rank the books based on many arbitrary (and a few quantifiable) factors. The rankings are full of biases and assumptions, and honestly, that is what makes this fun.
Podcast Downloads– Raw number of downloads that an episode received. I excluded Tacky from this calculation since that episode is not out yet.
iTunes Episode Popularity– iTunes lets me see how popular each episode is. It is slight different than raw downloads, because they take into account listeners at the time of recording, but they also only include people listening through iTunes. Again, Tacky was excluded from this category.
Goodreads Scores– I looked up each book on Goodreads and took that score.
Goodreads Reviews– I took the raw number of Goodreads reviews for each book.
Test of Time– The older a book is, the more credit it got, because it has withstood the “test of time”.
Social Media Input– I’ve asked The Stacks Instagram followers to tell me their favorite book we read this year, and those responses are incorporated.
Traci’s Personal Ranking– Thats right, I’m influencing this competition a little. It’s my podcast, so why not?
There are 12 books in the competition, so in each of those categories the books are rated on a scale of 1-12. Each book received a score from each category, 1 being the best, 12 the worst. I then tallied all the scores and divided by 7 (except in the case of Tacky which was divided by 5).
That sounds like a lot, but trust me, it makes sense. Here are the rankings based on these calculations, and their total overall raw scores, remember lower is better. Where there was a tie, I broke the tie based on my preference.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - 3.57
Erasure by Percival Everett - 3.85
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead - 4.28
It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover - 4.85
No Name in the Street by James Baldwin - 6.14
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu - 6.57
Jazz by Toni Morrison - 7.28
The January Children by Safia Elhillo - 7.28
Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo - 7.57
Luster by Raven Leilani - 7.7
Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin -8.28
Tacky by Rax King– 10.0
For those of you curious who won in previous years,
2018 - The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
2019 - Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
2020 - The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
2021 - Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
2022 - Passing by Nella Larsen
2023 - Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
Now go fill out your bracket and let’s get this party started!!!
If you want more of me and my nonsense be sure to subscribe to Unstacked and listen to The Stacks podcast every Wednesday and follow me over on Instagram for a lot more book content.
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I will do anything I can to make books more like sports. Sue me.
More sports.
Every year we run into problems of folks not filling out the final winner options. Please make sure you’ve selected a winner. I can’t help you if you don’t do this. Double check. Actually triple check. Quadruple? The limit does not exist.
Check again.
Looking forward to coming in dead last for the fifth year running 🙌🏼