Opening Round Recap and Quarterfinals Preview (Copy)
presented by
Opening Round Recap and Quarterfinals Preview
With Andrew Seal
Andrew Seal is a second-year grad student in American Studies. Fortunately for his career, he’s not called on to work with numbers very often. His research interests include Midwestern literature, the history of consumer culture, and frontier/Western history.
Welcome to the second year of Bracketology!
In 2010, I was asked to add some statistical order to the seeming chaos of the always unpredictable Tournament of Books. Like the N.C.A.A. March Madness from which our tournament takes its structure, I looked for trends, tendencies, and temptations at play when it comes to determining who advances to the next round. Some trends that I found were stronger than others; others may in fact be completely factitious—but hey, that’s the nature of “expert” opinion.
Of course, how books advance in our tournament is different from how basketball teams advance in March Madness, although I imagine both contests involve a slightly queasy amount of sweat. Books advance by convincing judges that they are better than their opponents; what counts is not whether the judge likes the book, but that she likes it better than the other book. This is obviously also quite different from how we usually read—although some of the most frequent comments about a book are “it’s better than this book” or “it’s not as good as that one,” we rarely structure those comparisons quite so rigorously against one specific other book. What kinds of attributes, then, might affect that process of comparison?
I am personally a big believer in the idea that the physical properties of a book have a substantial effect on our interaction with it.1 I’m not so much talking about that gut-level thrill you get when you touch a certain book and everything about just feels right (or just wrong). Well, actually I am talking about that, but “rightness” is a little difficult to define and plug into Excel. In discussing Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That, John Warner half-jokingly pointed to its disaster of a cover as a contributing factor in its loss, but again, I don’t feel confident in my abilities to create a reliable metric for “Cover Awfulness.”
One thing that is a little easier to attach numbers to is bulk—or page count. It’s difficult not to think about size when you’re comparing two books, especially if the difference in page count is significant. A longer book is also probably one that the judge has spent more time on, and so it’s plausible that some sense of personal investment will attach itself to the novel, if not of accomplishment—who doesn’t feel pretty good about herself after getting to the end of a 500-page baggy monster?
Here are the year-by-year average page lengths of both winners and losers for the opening round:
| Year | Winner | Loser | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 326.88 | 356.63 | -29.75 |
| 2010 | 361.50 | 355.38 | 6.13 |
| 2009 | 424.13 | 332.13 | 92.00 |
| 2008 | 335.88 | 359.63 | -23.75 |
| 2007 | 443.25 | 336.38 | 106.88 |
| 2006 | 282.63 | 363.00 | -80.38 |
| 2005 | 505.13 | 289.75 | 215.38 |
| Total | 382.77 | 341.84 | 40.93 |
| Total Last 3 | 370.83 | 348.04 | 22.79 |
2005, the first year of the tournament, was obviously a strange year, but there also hasn’t been a great deal of consistency in terms of judges’ preferences for longer or shorter books. What is notable is that, after 2005, the losers’ average page length changes very little—though the message should hardly be “don’t write books between 330 and 360 pages or you’ll never win the Rooster.”
Of course, these kinds of averages can hide quite a bit, so let’s look at individual matchups where the difference between the two books amounts to 300 pages or more:
| Longer | Shorter | Diff. | Winner | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Atlas | Finishing School | 337 | Longer | 2005 |
| I Am Charlotte Simmons | Wake Up, Sir | 354 | Longer | 2005 |
| Jonathan Strange | The Rope Eater | 496 | Longer | 2005 |
| Birds Without Wings | Harbor | 336 | Longer | 2005 |
| On Beauty | Beasts of No Nation | 322 | Shorter | 2006 |
| The Historian | Home Land | 336 | Shorter | 2006 |
| Against the Day | Pride of Baghdad | 984 | Longer | 2007 |
| Brookland | Firmin | 334 | Shorter | 2007 |
| Tree of Smoke | Ovenman | 372 | Longer | 2008 |
| Savage Detectives | Let the Northern Lights… | 351 | Shorter | 2008 |
| New England White | You Don’t Love Me Yet | 332 | Shorter | 2008 |
| 2666 | Steer Toward Rock | 643 | Longer | 2009 |
| Shadow Country | Disreputable History… | 547 | Longer | 2009 |
Now, including this year’s matchup of Skippy Dies (661 pages) and A Visit From the Goon Squad (273 pages), the overall record looks like this: eight wins for longer books, six wins for the shorter ones. That’s not quite as strong a trend as one might expect, however, to justify what we last year called a “gravitas gap.” On the other hand, if we break out the individual records of different page ranges, maybe we’ll get a better idea of what’s happening. The following graph also gives you a preview of what happens in the quarterfinals:2
| Page Count | Opening Round Winning % |
Quarterfinal Winning % |
|---|---|---|
| <200 Pages | 71.43% | 25.00% |
| >200, <300 Pages | 37.14% | 18.18% |
| >300, <400 Pages | 45.00% | 57.14% |
| >400, <500 Pages | 64.29% | 55.56% |
| >500 Pages | 68.75% | 80.00% |
| Longer Books | 57.14% | 66.67% |
| Shorter Books | 42.86% | 33.33% |
FROM OUR SPONSOR
The outstanding opening-round performance of very short books (like this year’s Nox, by Anne Carson) is somewhat surprising, but as you can see, that success doesn’t carry over to the quarterfinals, while the very solid performances by longer books do continue. And overall, the last two rows show that, whether the longer book is longer by 3 or 300 pages, fortune doesn’t favor the brief—the longer of the two books takes the bracket at a quite healthy clip, opening round or quarterfinals.
What else do judges compare when they’re thinking about which book to promote to the next round? One important possibility is genre, although I would argue that genre is not very useful to us, in part because so many books make legitimate claims to being two or three or more genres at once. Comparison, therefore, is often multivariable, not reducible to a straightforward statistic—say, dystopian novels beat historical fiction 75 percent of the time.
On the other hand, what we often mean when we say “genre” is something like “presumptions about where a book fits into the larger ecology of literature.” These presumptions can certainly produce elaborate classifications and taxonomies, but they also often operate more impressionistically—for instance, it seems that many people think that a historical epic that required a great deal of research is a more “serious” or more challenging work than a domestic novel. One (very inadequate) shorthand for collecting broad similarities in these types of fiction has been the author’s gender—who a writer is often activates routines in the reader’s mind of how to place him or her within the literary ecology, and the book itself is sort of assigned a gender—and often an age—to whom it is supposed to appeal, thereby determining its place more securely in the ecology.
Gender discrimination has recently been a hot topic of conversation among literary types, but I worry a little that by focusing primarily on numbers—with an implicit goal of a simple parity between genders—the question becomes less how a woman’s experience in the literary marketplace often differs from a man’s, and more about how we can avoid embarrassing ourselves by appearing to favor men too much. Parity isn’t always experientially the same as equality—just because there is an equal number of women and men in a room doesn’t mean that men might not still benefit from some forms of gender privilege.
Numbers do have their place, however, and here’s a quick table of the gender breakdown in the Tournament of Books:
| Male | Female | M % | F % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Books | 67 | 45 | 59.82% | 40.18% |
| Total Books, Last 3 Years | 28 | 20 | 58.33% | 41.67% |
| Total No. 1 Seeds | 19 | 9 | 67.86% | 32.14% |
| No. 1 Seeds, Last 3 Years | 7 | 5 | 58.33% | 41.67% |
| Opening Round Wins M v. F Matchups, Total |
23 | 16 | 58.97% | 41.03% |
| Opening Round Wins M v. F Matchups, Last 3 Years |
8 | 6 | 57.14% | 42.86% |
As you can see, men have quite an edge in the opening round—they’ve made up almost 60 percent of the books that make the tournament, more than two-thirds of the no. 1 seeds, and they also win almost three-fifths of the time. Again, my point isn’t to focus too much on the numbers, but rather to suggest that—particularly this year, when such good conversations have been had about how gender affects the reception of books that might, under the covers, actually look a lot alike—parity or something like it might facilitate those discussions, if for no other reason than that it’s difficult to have these discussions without having read a lot of fiction by women—and a lot of fiction by men. And on the other hand, as we may be about to see, women have historically owned the quarterfinals, winning 67 percent of the time in head-to-heads against men.
The other obvious peculiarity of the way a judge reads books in the tournament versus how she might read them in real life is in dealing with the seeding of books. The way that seeding has worked through seven years of the tournament, however, has been simple: No. 1 seeds do have a significant advantage, but the no. 2 seed historically has basically no effect whatsoever—despite no. 2 seeds having swept their opening round matches this year. Here are the numbers for the whole seven years of the opening round:
| Seed | Wins | Losses | Winning % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20 | 8 | 71.43% |
| 2 | 15 | 13 | 53.57% |
| 3 | 13 | 15 | 46.43% |
| 4 | 8 | 20 | 28.57% |
And here are the numbers for six years (2005-2010) of quarterfinals:
| Matchup | Incidences | Higher Seed Wins | Lower Seed Wins | Higher Seed Win % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. 1 v. No. 2 | 7 | 6 | 1 | 85.71% |
| No. 1 v. No. 3 | 11 | 8 | 3 | 72.73% |
| No. 2 v. No. 4 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 100.00% |
| No. 3 v. No. 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 33.33% |
Yet one wonders if seeding here is really just acting as a stand-in for that nebulous concept known as hype. Seeding is easy to keep track of, but could we even begin to quantify hype in the Tournament of Books? And if we can, can we do so in a helpful way? That is, if we make a reasonable stab at quantifying the “Hype Quotient” of this year’s books, does it have any correlation with the opening round’s results? Is there a preference for underdogs, or a submission to the juggernauts? Is there a level at which too high a hype becomes perilous for a book, leading to backlash?
These are some questions I want to take up in the next Bracketology, where I’ll actually make an attempt to put some numbers behind the idea of hype. For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed the opening round and are looking forward to the quarterfinals.
Footnotes
1 Although I’m not sure what to make of the fact that judges seem increasingly to be doing their reading on iPads, Kindles, or iPods. Comments are very welcome here. ↩
2 Also, 2011 results are factored into the opening round data. ↩
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: We find ourselves at the end of the first round and the tourney is off to one of its most exciting starts ever, with two no. 1s going down in the opening round for the first time in tournament history, or at least since we started actually paying some attention to seeding, which appears to be 2009.
In the spirit of our color commentary, in an innovation new to this year, I went out and asked obvious questions of one of our competitors, Teddy Wayne, author of Kapitoil, which lost in the very first match to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Picture me standing with a microphone, nodding mindlessly, periodically shouting my questions into the interviewee’s ear as the cheerleaders and acrobats make their way on to the floor for the halftime show.
Warner: Teddy, how did it feel when you found out your book was chosen for the Tournament of Books?
Wayne: Excited, then aroused, then euphoric for a few seconds, then flaccid, then, after a 15-minute refractory period, excited again.
Warner: How did you feel when you found out that Kapitoil was, in the words of one of our commenters, “the squirrel in Franzen’s talons?”
Wayne: While I didn’t expect to win against the formidable (and life-changingly-generous-with-his-endorsement) Mr. Franzen, I didn’t quite anticipate the drubbing I received in the style of the 1993 Michigan Fab Five v. the M.I.T. Freshman Intramural Asthmatics League. Still, as the young’un of the tourney, I lean to an “Aw, shucks, Coach, I’m just happy to play” sentiment while wheezing through my metaphorical inhaler. Judge Sarah Manguso is certainly entitled to her highly unfavorable opinion, but I would rather write (and read) a book that people either love or hate than one everyone agrees is harmlessly above average. So I’ll gladly make the trade of connecting strongly with some readers if at comes at the price of a few Mangusos.
Warner: What’s your favorite book in the Tournament of Books (excepting your own)?
Wayne: That would be like asking me to pick my favorite child, when you know I’m estranged from all seven of them. I’ll just say that Freedom, Room, Skippy Dies, and A Visit From the Goon Squad all pulled off things I can’t now or probably ever do, though I hope I learned a few tricks from them.
Warner: And what are you working on now?
Wayne: Some journalistic detritus, a comedic screenplay, and a new novel. Watch out, 2018 Tournament of Artistic Products Formerly Known as “Books” as Evaluated by an Esteemed Panel of Cyber-Judges Designed to Render 100 Percent Objective Literary Assessments Before Destroying Their Creators!
Thanks, Teddy!
One of the most fun, but perhaps most uncomfortable parts of the Tournament of Books is the way the reader comments hold us accountable for our own decisions, some of which we don’t remember making. One of the real controversies early in the tournament has been the seeding, with quite a few commenters lamenting the A Visit From the Goon Squad v. Skippy Dies match as one of both books being “underseeded” and too heralded to meet in the opening round. There’s also a question regarding Jennifer Weiner’s promotion of Room on her own website, as well as the inclusion of a book that’s probably not imaginative fiction (Nox) in a tournament supposedly reserved for such things.
The reason I’m listing all of these here is because it’s time for me to kick it over to you, which means you’ll have to take the first swing at responding.
Kevin: I would like to say that the reason you abruptly handed the mike to me just now is that you recognize my superior intellect is better suited to explaining the complex mathematical system we use to seed books in this tourney. Except I know that you know such a system doesn’t exist, except in the way that the mysterious and involuntary calculations performed by our frontal lobes when choosing to watch The Bachelor over the Jim Lehrer News Hour can be called a complex mathematical system.
There are inherent difficulties in setting up a bracket like this. One is that when we decide on the shortlist, we haven’t read all the books. Some of the books in the tourney, none of us had read yet. And we do it months in advance, and entirely by angry committee. And we were probably drinking, which likely explains the first-draft inclusion of a book called The Farticulant GRbBlti of Limoncello.
We have an informal tradition of giving books that win major awards not just a pass into the tourney, but also a pretty high seed. We started doing this so we could compare our award to theirs, and I think it’s a good idea, but it leads to some randomness. I think if it had been done later, Goon Squad might have been a no. 1. I’m not sure. But I don’t really regret the way we did it because we ended up with some really interesting opening-round matchups and we now have interesting quarterfinal matchups, and I think that adds tension to the tournament from beginning to end. We really don’t intentionally set out to make any book a calf for the sacrifice. And I’m excited that we had a couple of upsets in the opening round.
As for the Room v. Bad Marie controversy, Jennifer Weiner quite dutifully informed us beforehand that she had previously lauded Room and given away copies of it as a prize on her website. She assured us, however, that she could be impartial. And because changing the books around at that point would have been logistically difficult (by which I mean, “would have required driving to the post office,” something that was inadvisable due to the previously cited limoncello) we decided to disclose that information and move forward the way it was—and I don’t see anything in Weiner’s judgment that makes me believe she wasn’t giving her honest opinion. She could have been just as in love with Room without having given away copies of it on her website; even if we had given her two different books to judge there would have been no guarantee that she didn’t already love one of those novels, as well. Jennifer Weiner reads a lot of books, people.
No judge of any literary contest comes to the process without having any favorites or prejudices whatsoever going in. In the case of most book awards, where a handful of writers and critics lock their doors and argue it out over Skype (or so I imagine), I suspect every individual probably has some book they are privately championing at the outset. We never claimed that the Tournament of Books removes bias from the process. To the contrary, because we talk almost constantly about our preferences and about how absurd and unfair it is to compare works of literature in the first place, the ToB probably seems like the most biased book award of all time.
Especially to Marcy Dermansky. Read Bad Marie! It’s really good!
John: Another thing we should mention is that in the midst of climbing into our cups, we often bat around some of the ideas introduced by the readers in the comments. One of this year’s most intriguing ideas was the concept of a consolation round, where opening-round losers go into a competition amongst themselves, with presumably the top two that emerge from that process becoming our zombies. The unfortunate constraint we’re working under, however, is time. We always need to make sure that the judges have enough time to read the books, at least two weeks, since a truncated reading time would disfavor longer works, or maybe make us gun-shy in including them in the tournament. The reading and judging process for this year’s tournament actually began in January, and it’s sort of impossible to move it back any further.
Plus, given that you and I exist entirely on diets of Four Loko and Girl Scout Thin Mints in order to fuel ourselves as we crank out the commentary, having any additional rounds would probably flat-out kill us.
Kevin: All true.
I have an exciting announcement in a minute, but first, in the continuing interest of full disclosure, I used to be a creative director at Coudal Partners, one of the brain-fathers of this year’s tournament presenting sponsor Field Notes. Now, they came up with that particular genius stroke after I had left the company to go be a writer and dad, so I have no financial interest at all when I say that Field Notes are the official notebooks of the notes I take. I even created my own Field Notes hack involving Duck tape and an index card so it will fit in this little holder that goes in my pocket with a pen and other useful things. They really are awesome and handy. My wife uses them too, for whatever it is she does. And so we’d like to repeat, if you place any order with Field Notes during the tournament, be sure to enter the coupon code ROOSTER to receive a free and very cool, limited-edition ToB memo book (while supplies last).
And I want to remind everyone that Powell’s is offering 30 percent off all the ToB competitors for the duration of the tourney. You can also get the same discount on acclaimed books by ToB judges Rosecrans Baldwin, Jessica Francis Kane, and Anthony Doerr, plus my latest novel, as well.
Glancing ahead to next week’s quarterfinal matchups, Freedom v. Room is obviously the one they’ll be discussing in the salons and cafés and gentry parlors over the weekend. I’m also really looking forward to Model Home v. Lemon Cake. And of course, we have our near-homophonic Cinderellas, Next and Nox. One of those two books will be advancing to the semifinals.
Finally, it’s time to peek under the blanket we use to cover up the stunned zombies that had been clubbed with a shovel in the opening round and see which ones are still twitching. For people who aren’t familiar with the Zombie Round, we asked TMN’s readers back in January to vote for their favorite book from the list of 16. That way, when we get to the Zombie Round (it’s after the semifinals; see the right-hand column on this page), we take the top two reader favorites that have been eliminated from the tournament by that point and give them a second chance to do battle.
And so, if the Zombie Round were held today, the two books that would be raised from the dead are, in no particular order (unless alphabetical is an order), Bloodroot and Skippy Dies.
We still have a lot of ToB before then, however.
Reader comments