In celebration of National Library Week (April 6-12), we are holding a March Madness style tournament to help us determine the Adult Services Book of the Year! To start, we selected twenty-four books in four different categories:
Staff Picks – throughout the year, library staff recommend dozens of books – we picked the six that most commonly appeared on those recommendation lists.
Best of the YPL Book Clubs – The Yorkville Library is home to six different book clubs who read a different book together every month. We asked each of our book clubs to select their favorite book of the year.
LitHub.com’s Best Sellers – LitHub.com tracks the best selling books that were released in each calendar year.
Goodreads Choice Award Winners – Goodreads is a popular social media platform for readers. Each year they ask their millions of users to vote for the best books in dozens of different genres and categories. We selected six of the winners to participate in our tournament.
We are asking library patrons to vote each week in April to help their favorite books move on in the tournament.
Below is the tournament bracket, which will be updated after each round.
Local Division
In the final round of this year’s Battle of the Books, Kristin Hannah’s The Women took on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.
With 130 votes cast, The Women won the 2025 YPL Adult Services Book of the Year with over 80% of the votes.
We look forward to another exciting battle next spring.
National Division
2025 Battle of the Books Winner
2024 Battle of the Book Winner
