March Book Madness Challenge: Final Reminder and Prizes!

The list of basketball teams have been released so now we know which books and teams are matched together. It is the perfect time to join our challenge! See the challenge page for more details. Find out what prizes we will be offering and scroll to the bottom to see how teams and books are paired up.

REMINDER: You must submit your brackets prior to March 17th, 2016 in order to be officially competing for our prizes. You can play along with us without submitting a bracket but you will only qualify for our official scoreboard if you send your brackets in before the tournament. Request your bracket if you need one and I will email you a copy.

Prizes:
Grand prize (to the person who scores the most points – through a combination of reading and correct predictions): $50 Amazon gift card, a prize pack of 8 prize-winning books, major bragging rights, and should they choose to accept, the opportunity to publish a guest post on our blog (this post can be a way to plug your own blog, discuss an issue of relevance to you, review a book, plug your own book, or share your challenge experience). Winners will be able to select 2 books from the 2016 Pen/Faulkner shortlist, 2 books from the 2016 International Man Booker Prize, 2 books from the 2016 Bailey’s Prize long list, and 2 books from the 2015 National Book Awards finalists.

The Lucky Guess Prize (no reading required): This prize goes to the person who performed the best in their predictions regardless of how much or how little they read. $25 Amazon gift card and 2 books of your choice off of our book bracket.

Best Coach: $15 Amazon gift card. This prize will go to the person who nominated the winning book. Several people nominated the same books. The winner will be the person who submitted their nomination first.

NOTE: The competition is open internationally. However, international winners will receive ebooks rather than hardcopies of books. U.S. winners will be given the opportunity to select whether they would prefer ebooks or hard copy books.

Here are the Book – Team matches. Some teams need to play one more game before they secure a seed in the 64 bracket. In those cases you’ll see team a or team b next to the book name.

Midwest (Fiction U.S.) ranks
1. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena = Virginia
2. Epitaph = Michigan State
3. Night Film = Utah
4. City on Fire = Iowa State
5. All the Light We Cannot See = Purdue
6. Lonesome Dove = Seton Hall
7. The Queen of the Night = Dayton
8. We Are Water = Texas Tech
9. Did you Ever have a Family? = Butler
10. Turner House = Syracuse
11. Euphoria = Gonzaga
12. Fates and Furies = Little Rock
13. Infinite Jest = Iona
14. The Edge of Lost = Fresno State
15. The Sellout = Middle Tennessee
16. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist = Hampton

East (fiction non-U.S.)
1.  The Noise of Time = North Carolina
2.  Half of a Yellow Sun = Xavier
3. Rebecca = West Virginia
4. Room = Kentucky
5. A God in Ruins = Indiana
6. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki = Notre Dame
7. I Capture the Castle = Wisconsin
8. The High Mountains of Portugal = USC
9. The Illegal = Providence
10. Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend = Pittsburgh
11. Snow = Michigan or Tulsa (winner of first four game)
12. The Heather Blazing = Chattanooga
13. Shylock is my Name = Stony Brook
14. Bone and Bread = Stephen F. Austin
15. Minister without Portfolio = Weber State
16. What Lies Between us = FGCU or F Dickinson (winner of first four game)

West (science fiction/fantasy)
1. The Martian = Oregon 
2. The Lions of Al-Rassan = Oklahoma
3. Neverwhere = Texas A&M
4. The Fifth Season = Duke
5. Station Elevan = Baylor
6. Never Let me Go = Texas
7. The Dispossessed = Oregon State
8. Hild = Saint Joseph’s 
9. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams = Cincinnati
10. Ancillary Sword = VCU
11. The Library at Mount Char = Northern Iowa
12. New World Fairy Tales = Yale
13. All the Birds = UNC Wilmington
14. Uprooted =  Green Bay
15. The Beautiful Bureaucrat = Cal St Bakersfield
16. The Traitor Baru Comorant = Holy Cross/Southern (winner of first four game)

South (non-fiction)
1. Between the World and Me = Kansas
2. The Boys in the Boat = Villanova
3. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale = Miami
4. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks = California
5. H is for Hawk = Maryland
6. Into Thin Air = Arizona
7. The Warmth of Other Suns = Iowa
8. The Hot Zone = Colorado
9. The Year of Magical Thinking = UConn
10. The Snow Leopard = Temple
11. See you Made an Effort = Vanderbilt or Wichita St
12. In Other Words = South Dakota State
13. Dark Money = Hawai’i
14. = Charles Bukowski = Buffalo
15. Archive Fever = UNC Asheville
16. The Great Spring = Austin Peay