Introduction: The What, The Why, and The No Really, Why?!

On most days if you put a gun to my head and asked me what my favourite book is, after evacuating my renal system because OMG GUN (ALSO OMG CLICHE), I'd either answer A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy or Infinite Jest and the conversation would be over. So, then, one could argue that this exercise of rambling about the merits of one book versus another is pretty pointless. And one would be mostly correct.

That said, I've been doing as much reading as I've ever done lately, and occasionally it makes me realize that I really miss writing sometimes. I used to blog several times a week and was even occasionally funny between cringeworthiness, and some weeks now I go 7 days without contributing so much as 140 characters to the vast abyss of the internet. Not just that, but with this year's edition of the World Cup came a host of organizations putting some of their subject matters into a tournament format (e.g. 97.5 K-Rock's 4:00 faceoff playoff edition or FiveThirtyEight's world cup of country cuisines), and every time I read/hear something like that, I can't help but think it sounds like fun. Granted, most examples have voting contributions from their regular patrons, but I don't really feel like polling friends and acquaintances about their opinions of Snow Crash versus Kafka On The Shore, never mind trying to draw the Venn diagram of people I know who've read both.

(In a lot of matchups, I'm sure I'd be the only one I know anyway. I say that without intended pretension, just more of a who on Earth cares?)

Long story short: I'm about try to write 32 blog entries (including this one) discussing which of two books I like better. I'll seed it like a head-to-head tournament because that (rather inexplicably) sounds like fun to me. I'll be avoiding specific spoilers more substantial than a back cover or Goodreads description would give, but I'll be pulling quotes and talking themes/writing styles, so consider this a broad strokes warning if you ever intend to read any of these books and aren't one of those read-the-last-page-first types.

I'll try to do one a day, but given that this commitment is to me, by me, for me; I'll probably do it whenever I feel like it until I get bored.

So, on to the rules I'm arbitrarily picking for myself and how I'm going to choose and seed the books:

1) I'm going to pick 32 works of fiction that I have read. While the philosophical assertions of nonfiction and fiction can sometimes overlap and I can gain the same things from reading each, I find it hard to conceptually decide what I like better out of, say, Sex Drugs & Cocoa Puffs or Gone Girl. They both made me think really hard about pop culture, but the reading experiences are way too far apart to meaningfully compare them IMO. And it's IMO that counts!

That said, plenty of autobiographical fiction (Hunter S., Kerouac & Bukowski) still made the cut.

2) Anything that I didn't finish or outright hated is going to be excluded. I could righteously opine about how I can't be a fair judge if I didn't finish them, but frig that. Mostly they'd just be sharkbait for books I actually liked. Atlas Shrugged or Naked Lunch would lose to the bloody Cat In The Hat, to be honest.

3) In a similar vein to avoiding easy decisions, books that I read for school only and didn't really dig are trimmed also. It'd likely do me some good to reread The Women of Brewster Place or To Kill A Mockingbird as an adult, but I'll save that for the next edition (read: I probably won't do it).

The only real exception to this is Ian McEwan's Atonement, which I embarked to read casually for school and finished in a day because I couldn't put it down. That's rare for something a prof told me to do.

4) Anthologies will be excluded because it's just too much to try and talk about them cohesively. T.S. Eliot or Isaac Asimov would probably make it pretty far up my list, but the prufrock is in the pudding.

(That doesn't even make sense, I just haven't punned enough in this ramble)

This leaves me with something in the neighbourhood of 40-50 books I'd consider, and in a quick mental qualification round, I've managed to whittle the number to a nice, round 32. So that I have no control over the match-ups, the books are seeded 1-32 using Goodreads' rating for the books (listed in brackets like these), and then put into a winners-move-on bracket (no, not this kind of bracket). I'll compare each book to another book at least once until I finally decide, under closer scrutiny and attempted writing with flair and including quotes from my Kindle notes file and all that jazz, what is my favourite book?

(Spoiler alert: Infinite Jest will probably win. Don't read it though, it sucks.)

Here are the books and the bracket.

1) JRR Tolkien – LOTR: The Return of The King (4.48)

2) JRR Tolkien – LOTR: The Two Towers (4.38)

3) David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest (4.35)

4) Christopher Moore – Lamb (4.28)

5) Terry Pratchett – Small Gods (4.24)

6) JRR Tolkien – The Hobbit (4.20)

7) Douglas Adams – The Restaurant At The End of The Universe (4.19)

8) Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club (4.18)

9) Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (4.18)

10) Kurt Vonnegut – Cat's Cradle (4.18)

11) Pat Conroy – The Prince of Tides (4.17)

12) Douglas Adams – A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (4.17)

13) Frank Herbert – Dune (4.11)

14) Haruki Murakami – Kafka On The Shore (4.11)

15) Hunter S. Thompson – Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas (4.08)

16) Arthur C. Clarke – Childhood's End (4.05)

17) Charles Bukowski – Post Office (4.03)

18) Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five (4.01)

19) Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash (3.97)

20) Haruki Murakami – A Wild Sheep Chase (3.94)

21) Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl (3.93)

22) Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy (3.93)

23) Charles Bukowski – Women (3.93)

24) Chuck Palahniuk – Survivor (3.92)

25) Gillian Flynn – Dark Places (3.89)

26) Philip K. Dick – The Man In The High Castle (3.83)

27) Ian McEwan – Atonement (3.83)

28) Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go (3.78)

29) Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49 (3.71)

30) Douglas Coupland – jPod (3.68)

31) Jack Kerouac – On The Road (3.67)

32) Chuck Palahniuk – Diary (3.56)

& in delicious, pagebreaking bracket format:

Not fair. Not fair not fair not fair. I'll be elaborating plenty in the blog entries to come why I say that, but in short by the end of round 2, at least two of my top five or six stock-response “favourite books” will be gone. And that's just a taste of the excitement!*

So, won't you join me for a walk through my worthless opinions on a bunch of books I've read, in...

*Excitement not guaranteed. It's implied, but even then mostly ironically. Hi mom!