11. The Prince of Tides (Conroy) vs 27. Atonement (McEwan)

Previous Matches 

11. The Prince of Tides (Conroy) vs 22. The New York Trilogy (Auster)

27. Atonement (McEwan) vs 6. The Hobbit (Tolkien)

More Quote Porn

The Prince of Tides

"I had a feeling that sainthood was the most frightening and incurable disease on Earth"

"Those empty volumes were an eloquent metaphor of my life as a man. I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man."

"He could not force his century to make sense and he could find no place for himself within it. He had tried to conduct himself as an honorable man, a man who could not be bought or sold, and woke up one morning to find himself with a price on his head."

Atonement

"Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?"

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse."

"But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?"

Head-to-Head

Characters: Briony Tallis is both a character and a glimpse into the soul of authors. Tom Wingo is both a character and the embodiment of wasted potential. Both characters are ultimately concerned with and make poor decisions based on self, and are effective and real in this way. They have a strange amount in common, really. 

Beyond Cecilia and Robbie, it often feels as though Atonement's other characters are molded from templates of pre-World War II rich white British people—an oddly specific mouthful that you wouldn't think would have such common and entrenched tropes, but it does and we know them. 

Conroy could have been similarly vapid with Southern characters in The Prince of Tides, but the book's characters are a series of curveballs with original, sometimes wacky traits that are detailed at length and often unexpected. This advantage of depth tips the scales. 

Advantage: The Prince of Tides. 

Setting: The Southern US is overdone, and I seldom appreciate it. Conroy defied these odds and painted a beautiful picture of the Carolina coast. McEwan answered with vivid war scenes and a mansion in the British countryside—neither of which are anywhere near unique or fresh. Even though both novels boast fine representations in saturated fields, Conroy succeeded at piquing my interest in his corner of time and space.

Advantage: The Prince of Tides. 

Plot: Oh, this is a toughie. Atonement twists and turns in a surprise frame tale, while The Prince of Tides plods along without the same scale of dramatic crests found in its opponent. Still, the artful unraveling of The Prince of Tides makes up for its relative lack of dramatics.

Advantage: Push. Both too good. 

Ending: Both were great, fitting endings. The Prince of Tides pulled a final sentence that I found shocking, but my guard may have been down due to the aforementioned dramatic constancy. Atonement pulls a plot twist that's really hard to see coming, and it's done well. I was actually mad when I put it down, but the more time goes on, the more I appreciate what McEwan did there. It's up there with Infinite Jest for taking one of the book's principle themes and really illustrating it. 

Advantage: Atonement.

Language/Writing: McEwan writes so darn smoothly, and in a very postmodern fashion that I love (despite the Victorian undertones). Conroy is bloody verbose, and is quite a turnoff for many tastes—but not mine. The deciding factor here for me is the narrative material: I think McEwan's plot would shine regardless of how well it was written. I've read stories like The Prince of Tides and not given them the time of day because they weren't as compellingly told. This elevation is an ever-so-slight tie-breaking strength. 

Advantage: The Prince of Tides. 

Philosophy: The Prince of Tides is light on outside meditation in favor of character-based self-pity. Atonement is a thoughtful tour de force illustrating that you are what you eat write.
Advantage: Atonement. 

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

My recent revisit of Atonement's plot, themes and writing has reminded me what a great book it was, and is nudging me towards eventually reading some more McEwan. What's more, its short length is a weekend read rather than a project like The Prince of Tides was. But then, while almost universally more arduous, project reads often reap better rewards, and such was today's case in a close heat. 

The Prince of Tides rises into the third round. 

3. Infinite Jest (Wallace) vs 14. Kafka On The Shore (Murakami)

Previous Matches

14. Kafka On The Shore (Murakami) vs 19. Snow Crash (Stephenson)

3. Infinite Jest (Wallace) vs 30. JPod (Coupland)

More Quote Porn

Kafka On The Shore

"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."

"Asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime."

"But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to."

Infinite Jest

"Mediocrity is contextual."

"It towered, a kind of Überad, casting a shaggy shadow back across a whole century of broadcast persuasion. It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase."

"The feeling is why I want to. The feeling is the reason I want to die. I'm here because I want to die. That's why I'm in a room without windows and with cages over the lightbulbs and no lock on the toilet door. Why they took my shoelaces and my belt. But I notice they don't take away the feeling do they."

Head-to-Head

Characters: Hal Incandenza and Kafka Tamura actually have a lot in common: both are teen protagonists who are well-read and would be insufferable were it not for the more endearing traits of each. While Hal's story is mostly static around his home and school, he embarks on mental adventures with mari'huana & hallucinogens, and in a less metaphorical way, we meet Kafka as he's leaving home for good. Both styles of adventure are rewarding to follow along.

The breadth of Infinite Jest allows for the cast to have another deep, pseudo-protagonist in Don Gately as well as dozens of other players who are three-dimensional. Wallace's characters are everything; there are characters from opposing political factions who literally never leave a mountainside conversation during the book and act almost solely as a vehicle for setting and context. This is only a short example, but the entire tome is framed by its many characters in similar ways, and as much as I really liked Kafka and Oshima, they aren't enough on their own to fell the entire township of Enfield. 

Advantage: Infinite Jest. 

Setting: Kafka On The Shore bears most of Murakami's most famous tropes for setting: a deserted cabin in the woods, urban and rural Japan in varying doses, dreamlike only-maybe-real moments in hardly distinct places—all of which are set in the real world. Meanwhile, Infinite Jest is a lot of fun with its political landscape and irradiated postwar U.S.A. O.N.A.N., as well as the microsocieties in the tennis academy and the halfway house. Both are huge draws for their books, but Wallace's setting kind of ends at necessary-fun, and doesn't quite transcend to full-blown atmosphere like Murakami's does. 
Advantage: Kafka On The Shore. 

Plot: Both contain a ton of the moments that remind me why I read, with reveals and realizations of how things are or were in the plot. But then, there are frustrating 5-page passages in Infinite Jest written entirely in attempted ghettospeak that really do nothing other than give background to an unimportant character, and sections in Kafka On The Shore have little to do with the advancing plot and are so attemptedly symbolic (not to mention sometimes horrific) that they're meaningless. Infinite Jest was a slow burn that didn't actualize until after the story was over, meanwhile Kafka On The Shore was a pageturner that turned unsatisfying during long swaths of the conclusion.
In short: both plots occasionally suffer from their authors' gifts for writing, but both are compelling and memorable.
Advantage: Push. 

Ending: I wish someone would tell me what Kafka was supposed to be about other than a coming of age novel. Don't get me wrong: it's so satisfying at the end when Kafka leaves for home that it felt like an earned victory. Roll the Final Fantasy fanfare music and call it a wrap. But, the more I Google opinions and reread passages, the less I can wed the happenings and symbols of the book to get the bloody point. Conversely, while Infinite Jest also ended with a number of questions, similar further reading explains and justifies pretty much everything in the book to me. I like it when I get things, even if I need some help from a better book student than me.
Advantage: Infinite Jest. 

Writing/Language: The authors use their considerable skills for completely different effects. Murakami's reputation for dreamy atmosphere and beautiful Oriental settings precedes him. Wallace's often muddling turns of phrase are used to express a lot with a little such that the considerable length of his books is still generally dwarfed by the content of them. Wallace is definitely the more soundbyte-friendly of the two, but Murakami's ambiance is second to none. It's a matter of opinion thing, but I have this problem where I love both. 
Advantage: Push.

Philosophy: If anyone can ever condense and explain the philosophical dowry of Kafka On The Shore, give me a call. It's neat how it borrows philosophy from many other bright writers and thinkers, but the whole thing lacks a unified point. 
Infinite Jest is spectacular, representing qualities of the Samizdat in the plot itself. It's a short question that the book poses: if there were media so divine that you gave up your self to consume it, is it worthwhile? And, if not, what is the nature of entertainment? It's a brain cooker. 
Advantage: Infinite Jest. 

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

tl;dr: I like symbolism, but Murakami's symbols might as well be hieroglyphics. Kafka On The Shore has favorite book potential written all over it, but as I've harped on enough, I just can't get past what I can't get. 

Infinite Jest continues its march through the bracket, moving to round 3. 

4. Lamb (Moore) vs 13. Dune (Herbert)

Previous Matches

4. Lamb (Moore) vs 29. The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon)

13. Dune (Herbert) vs 20. A Wild Sheep Chase (Murakami)

More Quote Porn

Dune

"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I remain."

"Survival is the ability to swim in strange water."

"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the ecosystem, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive."

Lamb

" 'Did you build this place, Balthasar?' I asked. 

'Oh, no,' he said, without turning around. 'This was always here, I simply had to remove the stone that occupied it.' "

"It's very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in strange robes start giggling. Buddhism."

"If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes."

Head-to-Head

Characters: So we've got poor man's psychic desert Christ vs caricature Christ. 

Oh, bother. 

It's an endeavor to take writing as dry as in the Bible, stay even remotely relevant to the source material, and write compelling funny guys. Granted, the funniest guy of all who tells the story in Lamb is wicked fictitious (we assume), but he's still a good lens to view the scripture's main characters through. Dune's characters may have been fresh on its release, but if they were, they didn't stand the test of time. 

Advantage: Lamb. 

Setting: It would be so easy for Moore to have been complacent whilst writing Lamb, sticking to the rivers and the lakes that we're used to. But, he instead endeavored to chase waterfalls and cliffsides and lush fields and epic live-in caves and all sorts of heights of Earthly wonder. Arrakis is an arid planet with a full, rich setting complete with songs and politics and culture—facets not always covered in science fiction. Both writers could've mailed it in on their settings, and neither did. I'm giving Moore the nudge because he had an existing framework to write in and still managed to be spectacular. Constrained creativity is way harder than "hey, I made this planet!", even though both are plenty entertaining.

Advantage: Lamb. 

Plot: Both books feature a guy becoming a messiah, more or less. Both are intriguing, but oddly enough, it's a little harder to telegraph the path in Lamb. Though it became sort of obvious what Moore was going for after the boys visited Balthasar, he tied it together in a way that was totally unexpected from the book's beginnings. In its own right, Dune is twisty, but it foreshadows pretty much everything extensively. It's a stylistic difference, and each has arguable merits. Typically, though, the more a book surprises me, the better.

Advantage: Lamb.

Ending: I didn't love Lamb's ending, nor the frame tale's ending within it. Dune ends with a great duel that blends Herbert's attentions to culture, politics and body language in a cohesive conclusion.

Advantage: Dune. 

Language/Writing: Lamb is hilarious and Moore writes his punchlines well. Dune is routinely quotable despite simple language. There are a lot moore Christophers than there are Franks. 

Advantage: Dune. 

Philosophy: Lamb kind of pulls a catch-all style, paying visits and tributes to other old religions in a way that would really set Christ up to be the one true leader of men. Dune is rife with reflection on bureaucracy, religion, and is a large allegory (intentional or not) to Middle Eastern politics. Both touch on similar subjects, but Lamb does so in an endearing and lighthearted way, while Dune could cause sleep loss for cynics. As in Dune's round one match, I'm going with the one that's more comfortable to think about.

Advantage: Lamb.

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

Dune was certainly a feat in creative writing that's achieved classic, must-read status... it just hasn't aged so well. In this round, it faced a fresh take on another story that hasn't aged so great itself, but Moore's retelling is hilarious and lead me to consider spirituality more than any real-life religious text has in years. 

Lamb fleeces Dune to move to the third round. 

5. Small Gods (Pratchett) vs 21. Gone Girl (Flynn)

Previous Matches

5. Small Gods (Pratchett) vs 28. Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro)

21. Gone Girl (Flynn) vs 12. A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Adams)

More Quote Porn

Small Gods

"I like the idea of a democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts," said Brutha. "That way, everyone's happy. Think about it."

"The world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they'd left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise, you'd go mad."

"Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time."

Gone Girl

"I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy."

"It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters."

"There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold."

Head-to-Head

Characters: I've detailed previously that Small Gods boasts a cast that's up there with the timeless gang from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series: multifaceted, hilarious caricatures that are perfectly insane sociopaths sometimes and just like the rest of us some other times (and those things aren't mutually exclusive). It's sort of hard for Gone Girl to compete; Nick and Amy, despite being trapped in a thrilling narrative, are two of the least pitiable characters I've read. It's harsh, but I can't help feeling like both of their situations are their own damn fault. (I can be judge-y when they're fictional characters, right?)

Advantage: Small Gods. 

Setting: Gone Girl happens in a real world. Small Gods happens in a magical cartoon BCE landscape. Both authors make great strides to set up their world, and I really can't pick one over the other, citing the ol' too-different-copout. 

Advantage: Push. 

Plot: Like a good knock-knock joke, Small Gods spent about 60% of its time setting up jokes, another 20% fostering bemused anticipation, and the last 20% on hilarious payoff. A solid format for a humour book, no doubt—but Gone Girl is a wild ride that appeals to the story-hungry and elaborate book student alike. 

Advantage: Gone Girl. 

Ending: I've aired my hesitance with Gone Girl's ending at length. Competent, but a letdown to me after the dandy plot. But then, the denouement to Small Gods is happy ending-ish (as most humour is), but didn't really do it for me either. Both books had happenings & thoughts throughout that were almost too good for their respective conclusions. 

Advantage: Push. 

Writing/Language: Contrary to the ending category where both were weak, here both are strong. Gillian Flynn matches the best of modern authors (also immediate in my mind: Palahniuk, McEwan) for writing prose that reads like a cool, relatable stream of consciousness from the characters' perspectives. Pratchett isn't as elaborate on his characters' inner workings, nor do I feel like I know Brutha or Vorbis or any of his characters, but the man writes a mean punchline—and that's the point. 

Advantage: Push. 

Philosophy: Small Gods' ruminations on the failings of organized religion and the merit of true faith are hefty, heavy thoughts that aren't yet and may never be irrelevant. Gone Girl holds a mirror up to media coverage (and the societal roles thereof), to patriarchal models, to originality and its long overdue obituary... again, relevant and weighty. Gone Girl's themes may not maintain their relevance forever, but here and now, both are valid. 

Advantage: Push. 

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

Once again, Gone Girl meets spectacular comedy novel and pushes almost every category.
As I tend to do, I'll break the tie with the part of the book most important to me here and now: generally plot or philosophy, depending. Small Gods is a riot, but it's hard to argue the merits of a comedy in the face of a well-written drama. 

Or, at least, that's what the Oscars keep telling me. 

Gone Girl goes to round three. 

8. Fight Club (Palahniuk) vs 24. Survivor (Palahniuk)

Previous Matchups

24. Survivor (Palahniuk) vs 9. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)

8. Fight Club (Palahniuk) vs 25. Dark Places (Flynn)

More Quote Porn

Fight Club

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

"You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap."

Survivor

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

"Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine."

Head-to-Head

Characters: I can see a lot of these categories pushing because they came from the same mind. In particular, the characters in each are initially ultra-real and then grow to verge on the surreal towards the end (Tyler Durden, Fertility: I'm looking at you two). The characters from the organizations found in each book (the Creedish people, Project Mayhem) form a cast that has a hilarious, parodic intensity. Both are strong, and under a microscope it's unsurprising that they both came from Palahniuk's pen. To me, that makes 'em inseparable. 

Advantage: Push. 

Setting: I think the greater effort of the two is in Survivor. While Fincher's movie definitely gave a visual anarchistic beauty to the tail end of the narrative in Fight Club, the setting is basically Anytown, USA. Survivor conjures much more intense imagery with the gradually-worsening plane situation and its rich, Jonestown-like cult settings. Fight Club's setting is functional and effective, but Survivor's setting makes a richer, stranger plot.

Advantage: Survivor.

Plot: Well, both are page-mowers with great stories that aren't too long while still remaining just convoluted enough. The benefits of both differ, however: Fight Club's greatest attraction is its sense of idealism and anarchy, while Survivor's is permeating tension where the pages literally count down instead of up.

Advantage: By my tastes, Survivor. 

Ending: I mentioned in round one how Survivor was the first post-modern, hey-author-please-explain-this ending I ever read. It stuck with me for that reason, but I feel like Fight Club did a great job of twisty face-slap ending that wasn't as hard to understand. It's not that I mind working for my understandings, but Survivor's wasn't particularly weighty for the effort it entailed.  

Advantage: Fight Club. 

Language/Writing: I think Palaniuk's style is great, but he's no Palahniuk.

Wait... shit. 

Advantage: Push. 

Philosophy: The revolution will not be televised vs what if D.B. Cooper was a cultist? Both make plenty of statements about public image and media and how they reflect on each other. Fight Club ends hopefully in a we-can-overcome sort of way, while Survivor is mostly the story of a guy. My answer to this question depends mostly upon how cynical I feel in a particular day.

Advantage: Fight Club. 

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

A 2-2 tie, is it?

Survivor's plot breaks the tie because I love a pageturner. If a book has that kind of intensity while still being thoughtful and expertly written, all the better. Fight Club is probably the more pensive of the two and will almost definitely be Palahniuk's legacy, but I'm going with the underdog that is a better narrative IMO. 

Survivor flies on to round 3, just barely. 

1. Lord of The Rings: Return of The King (Tolkien) vs 16. Childhood's End (Clarke)

Previous Matchups

1. Lord of The Rings: Return of The King (Tolkien) vs 32. Diary (Palahniuk)

16. Childhood's End (Clarke) vs 17. Post Office (Bukowski)

More Quote Porn

The Return of The King

"For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

"His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom."

Childhood's End

"There were things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded."

"No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become disoriented with powers and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart."

Head-to-Head

Characters: The now-broken Fellowship helped to forge a genre's identity. The interactions between Frodo and Sam, in this book especially, are the most complex (even if they're entirely morally unambiguous). 

The interactions in Childhood's End, though, are top notch: Rikki Stormgren and Karellen have an endearing relationship, Jan Rodricks is a beacon for human curiosity and his endgame relationship with the Overlords is heavily symbolic and interesting. It's not all grandiose; Rupert Boyce is a caricature of a rich party animal and George Greggson is the everyman.

Both are stellar, but Clarke gets a lot more depth in fewer pages. 

Advantage: Childhood's End. 

Setting: Hey, new category! Middle Earth is one of the fullest, most developed settings that literature has ever seen. Childhood's End features some neat landscapes (spacescapes?), but they're much more bare-bones than Tolkien's creation. 

Advantage: Return of the King.

Plot: The plot in Childhood's End is important more for the questions it poses than for what-happens-and-to-who. Return of The King features a delayed, yet satisfying end to a feat of epic writing. Hard to argue this one.

Advantage: Return of the King. 

Ending: Said it before, and I'll say it again: Clarke is a brilliant writer, but he should be kept as far away as possible from the conclusion of any piece of fiction. 

Advantage: Return of the King, by default.

Language/Writing: Clarke's writing is as plain and simple as I've seen in a sci-fi writer (noting that I mean this as a compliment, really). Tolkien is voluminous, and although his descriptiveness is occasionally overused, it's as sharp as any elven sword when he's describing the tense battles and events that close the trilogy. 

Advantage: Push: one for effective use of brevity, and one for effectively having never heard of it.

Philosophy: What does the end of the road look like for human intelligence? For human conflict? For human life? It doesn't get much weightier than that, and the questions are blended seamlessly into a pretty solid story. 

Advantage: Childhood's End. 

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

This is probably the first time that, after closer analysis, I ended up picking a different book than I'd picked before starting the blog. I love the philosophical musings and themes that run in Childhood's End enough that I'd probably say I like the book more—but, insofar as the facets of the books go, Return of The King just offers more. It's a paper-thin margin and if you ask me which book is better 100 times, I'd probably answer each one 50 times depending on whether I felt like thinking or whether I felt like a good story.

Return of The King moves to the third round.

Updated Bracket & Minor Format Changes For Round 2

A minor housekeeping note for round 2: the "A Few Thoughts" section bites the dust because, aside being a vehicle for me to ramble aimlessly, I've already expressed a few thoughts about each book in round one. So, I'll just be linking to previous posts for each book in the conversation rather than rehashing the thoughts I've already written. 

Quote Porn will remain as a section because I have extensive notes from each book and, in some cases, saved some of my favorite quotations for later when I know a book might run deep. Further to that, the Head-to-Head sections will probably lengthen considerably as I get more specific in the decision-making process without the Few Thoughts as a buffer. 

Finally, there were a couple times in the first round where I wished I'd included a setting/universe/etc portion in the head-to-head. So, that'll pop up in the Head-to-Head section this time around, even if it does end up pushing more often than not. 

Also, if you're actually reading any or all of this blog: thanks!

2. Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers (Tolkien) vs 31. On The Road (Kerouac)

Quote Porn

The Two Towers

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

"I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to."

On The Road

"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road."

"It was embarrassing. Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night?"

A Few Thoughts

The Two Towers benefits greatly from being the middle child in Tolkien's Lord of The Rings series. I didn't even include The Fellowship of The Ring in this tournament because, due to Tolkien's elaborative style, it gets off the ground in the slowest way possible and isn't among my favorites. It's an intriguing read the first time through when you don't know the story, but I'll never scan its pages a second time because its plot moves like molasses uphill. Further, as I detailed earlier with Return of the King, Tolkien was dissatisfied to let the narrative end and extended the resolution by chapters more than was necessary. The Two Towers, though, is safe from positional extenders and hits the ground running about as fast as anything written by Tolkien does. 

Every battle I've ever imagined models itself from the Battle at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. It's the definitive large-scale fight scene. I can't imagine how hard it would be to write a scene with tens of thousands of participants, but Tolkien pulls it off. It has the right mix of descriptions of what the major characters are doing at any given moment and what successes the greater mobs are having with larger objectives. Tolkien's not alone or unique in this ability, but he was one of the first to pull off the large feat of this large feature.

As Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski famously detailed, vehicles in science fiction works often travel at the speed of plot. So, too, do so many horses, eagles and dragons in Tolkien's world. What are the odds of the ring-bearing hobbits encountering Boromir's surviving brother on the outskirts of Mordor? How about Gandalf getting to the gates or Isengard just in time to find the two lost hobbits? And who could forget the sudden appearance of a forest at the aforementioned Helm's Deep. It's not that I mean to put a premium value on suspension of disbelief in a book about hobbits and wizards and the like, but I always remembered The Two Towers as feeling a little unnatural. You knew the good guys would eventually win because of the good luck and chance encounters that feel less like serendipity and more like deus ex machina.

Still, it's easy to say that 60 years on when even fantasy novels have become much coarser and more morally ambiguous than the genre that Tolkien fathered. It's a small foible in a book that had its role as a gamechanger for 20th century fiction. 

Before I read On The Road, a friend once remarked to me that every one of his buddies who'd read it proceeded to get sad. It was a confusing thing, given that it's a semi-autobiographical road trip adventure, but reading the book made me understand: Kerouac writes this style so well that he makes people sad that it's not them. Luckily, I feel as though a couple 6000/8000 km driving jags with friends that I experienced before experiencing Kerouac helped vaccinate me against this sadness, but my reaction notwithstanding; it's a testament to Kerouac's writing ability that he is so capable of expressing the feelings of experiencing the open road with friends and youth and drugs and everything that has come to exemplify the decades immediately after On The Road's publishing. 

One of Kerouac's greatest achievements is Dean Moriarty. It's questionable how much of his character is created and how much of Neal Cassady's real-life insanity wrote itself. I feel that almost everyone has a Dean in their life; a friend who is at once endearing and infuriating, who's a beacon for both adventure and trouble. Sal Paradise's on-again, off-again friendship with Dean against an ever-changing backdrop of US cities and wild nights, though a rare experience, is definitely relatable just for the confounding comfort he finds in that relationship. 

Like much autobiographical fiction, one of On The Road's weakest points is its ending. I complained about The Two Towers' coincidental timings; meanwhile, On The Road is never serendipitous, but a series of recollected adventures. It sort of feels like a collection of five short stories without any tension in their ending, with the plot just floating as if on waves without any real destination. This is both good and bad: the best parts of any road trip are the in-the-moment decisions of following the road as it takes you—but that doesn't lend itself extensively to the fiction novel format. It's not that it's a novel where nothing really happens, but moreso that it's a novel where nothing really changes.

That said, the purpose of reading On The Road isn't just about passive reception of a story. It's about Kerouac's ability to turn a phrase, and about following him and his friends on an adventure worth sharing. 

Head-to-Head

Characters: Both are rife with interesting folks. It's a little odd deciding in favor of a book whose characters are as rooted in fact as in fiction, and what's more, Tolkien's fellowship are the literal basis for most fantasy character tropes today. But, the deciding factor: Dean manages to be the most one-of-a-kind rare bird that everyone knows, and that duality is impressive. 

Advantage: On The Road. 

Plot: Frodo & Sam's adventure manages to be more exotic than any of Sal & Dean's. And that's not considering the orc-filled battlefields to supplement them!

Advantage: The Two Towers. 

Ending: The Two Towers ends on several cliffhangers because that's what trilogies' second books are supposed to do—but, for the fourth time in this blog, dat Battle.

Advantage: The Two Towers. 

Language/Writing: Kerouac's style elevates a glorified collection of real-life short stories to a readable, mostly-cohesive novel. And he's insightful, to boot. 

Advantage: On The Road.

Philsophy: Lord of the Rings is largely about the narrative. While there are themes of scorched earth and a bleak future in The Two Towers, On The Road had #yolo down to an art form 30 years before Drake was even born. 

Advantage: On The Road.

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

It's funny: ask me what my favorite Lord of The Rings book is, and I'll almost definitely answer The Two Towers. But, while Return of the King made it through to round two, The Two Towers faced a tougher first round draw for Tolkien, and his best book is sent packing. 

On The Road travels on to the second round. 

15. Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas (Thompson) vs 18. Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)

Quote Porn

Slaughterhouse Five

" 'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?'

'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'

'I say Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?' "

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

"He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes."

Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas

"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride... and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well... maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."

"Good people drink good beer."

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

A Few Thoughts

Again today, the bracket pits two master-of-phrase wordsmiths against each other. And what's more: these books happened, more or less. 

(Note: Forgive me for spending so much of this passage equating and comparing the book and the movie; I really think they're inseparable and both just deadly. Also, forgive me for forgetting the movie Where the Buffalo Roam because, although I love Bill Murray as much as the next guy... c'monnn. Not even close.)
If there was an award for "best book to screen transition ever ever", and it was given at my discretion somehow, I would give it to Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas—even though it wasn't even nominated for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars, which is kind of the same thing. 
Like Fight Club that I detailed a couple weeks ago, this is a case where I saw the movie and was movied to read the book. Johnny Depp's doppelganging aside, the movie did a wonderful job of catching the spirit of the book. The sense of reckless adventure permeated throughout the movie; some of the best quotes were pulled verbatim (see: that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back, and preceding sentiments); it wasn't heavily whitewashed of drugs or censored for the screen; everything was just right like the San Franciscan nights that Thompson describes. 
So, then, one may ask what the book has to offer. And, to be honest, depending on the strength of one's imagination vs one's appreciation for filmography, the answer may range from Not so much to Pretty much everything. Despite the lifting of so many now-classic quotes, there are still so many descriptions and interactions that are written by Thompson in a way that a screen can never truly capture. The honest descriptions of drug habits and of the twisted highs really have an art to them on the page, as I see it. Even though Depp plays a masterful Hunter S, the movie is frank in its admission that there's no way the pictorial representation can transcend the words laid to paper decades ago—shown by the number of voice-overs with direct text quotations. 
Perhaps, then, it's a test for preference in the case of books v movies. Really, with so much in common from each version of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas, and with both mediums harnessed so effectively, the preference between this book and this movie could be a litmus test for books vs movies in general. 
Or, perhaps Johnny Depp in a safari hat is just incomparable. Either or. 

Slaughterhouse Five is quite the bizarre trek through the firebombing of Dresden. It's sort of unique in its presentation: the war scenes are either inspired by, or straight up recalled by Vonnegut from his time serving during the second great war... and then, when the grip of autobiographical + historical fiction is just setting in, it's like surprise! Time travel & aliens! I wouldn't term this a strategy of mass appeal, but it adds flavor and removes gravity—it's easy to enjoy the twists and turns of Vonnegut's time in 1940s Germany when it's sorta-ridiculous-sorta-real rather than concentration-camp-roundtable-discussion-hour. 
What's also impressive is that, beyond a history narrative and sci-fi elements, Vonnegut managed to squeak so many of his staple attractions into the book. There's plenty of atheist-biased reflection on spirituality (if that's your dig); Vonnegut's bleak humour shines against a torrid backdrop of war horror; there's a novel take on time travel; there's a peaceful take on death... just so much atmosphere and so much philosophy are served up in Slaughterhouse Five.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of the novel is the refrain that has come to be its call sign: so it goes. It's really hard to represent the effect of the phrase without explaining so many situations where it arises and without spoiling/explaining half the book. It's one of those phrases like Houston, we have a problem or so, so many others that will seep into everyday conversation. It pervades the book itself, too, and kind of becomes a Zen mantra all its own. It's another great feature in a rock-solid book by a weighty author.

Head-to-Head

Characters: Billy Pilgrim is really the only memorable face in Slaughterhouse Five to me. Fear & Loathing also has one central memorable face, but the addition of that face's attorney is enough to tip the scales.

Advantage: Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. 

Plot: Hunter S Thompson's adventures, much like Bukowski's forever 21 lifestyle in Women, represent living the dream in book form. It's so compelling to me. 

Advantage: Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. 

Ending:  Fear & Loathing kind of works as a snapshot: the story doesn't end so much as the book ends. Meanwhile, Slaughterhouse Five's book-ending is solid, but Billy Pilgrim's ending is solemn and thought-provoking. 

Advantage: Slaughterhouse Five. 

Language/Writing: I feel like the last few blogs have had really hard decisions here because the language/writing is the highlight of so many books I enjoyed enough to consider for this tournament. I'm just flat copping out of this because I love the style of both of these books far too much to pick one. 

Advantage: Push. 

Philosophy: Oh man. Thompson is actually pretty deep when you consider his commentaries on what it means to really live—but Vonnegut answers with some really sobering thoughts about mortality, morality, war and religion. Heavy hitters both. 

Advantage: Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes. 

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

Today features another love-'em-in-the-same-way, might-as-well-flip-a-coin decision. In the end, both were spectacular, funny and thought-provoking, but Slaughterhouse Five I would describe as insightful, where Fear & Loathing is pensive without advocating too many answers to the significant questions it implies. 

Slaughterhouse Five wins, only because I have to pick one. 

10. Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut) vs 23. Women (Bukowski)

Quote Porn

Women

"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."

"I had been given careful directions. The directions were confusing, but I followed them and had no trouble. It was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn't much left you could depend on."

"I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive on its own terms."

Cat's Cradle

"Science is magic that works."

" 'I'm not a drug salesman, I'm a writer. 

'What makes you think that a writer is not a drug salesman?' "

"In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.

And God said, 'Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.' And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. 'What is the purpose of all this?' he asked politely.

'Everything must have a purpose?' asked God.

'Certainly,' said man.

'Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,' said God.

And He went away."

A Few Thoughts

The thing about Women is that its title is almost definitely the exact opposite of its target audience. It's a book to be read with a grain of salt; I am no more than an armchair, believe-in-the-tenets-but-not-in-the-effort-involved feminist, but the objectification of women hits a ridiculous high-water mark in Women, even for a dirty old man in his fifites writing in the 1970s. With that said, if you can forgive a novel written in a less enlightened context &/or consider it a period piece, Bukowski is an absolute riot, and his stories are like a 30-years-older Tucker Max from 30 years ago. 
Ernest Hemingway once famously said write drunk, edit sober. Bukowski ate, breathed and lived this. Women describes so many of his California nights spent in a bending blur wherein he typewrites several pages of manuscript, only to black out and wake up the next morning wondering if he'd written anything at all. I enjoyed the book's style much more than Post Office: rather than recounting his days on a menial job, Bukowski details the dream of so many young single folks who want to get paid to write and not have a job to show up at and effortlessly be an object of desire to attractive members of the opposite sex and drink every night into oblivion and just generally be a hot mess forever by virtue of god-given talent. It's a pipe dream in book form, and it's more of a laughing affair than a bragging one. 
The book isn't without its shortcomings: Bukowski encounters a stream of women who seem to each get younger, prettier and wilder than the last. Wash, drink, rinse, drink, repeat. A less forgiving attention span or stricter intolerance for chauvinism may not find it as funny nor as engaging as I did, but then, most folks of that opinion will read the book's summary and know better than to begin reading it at all. 
Of the handful of Bukowski I've read, this book is the most on point with the quotables and the food-for-thoughts. Although seldom surprising in his insights, Bukowski's phrasings (see above quote porn section) often coolly express something his reader feels deep down, except that he's got the knack to pound it into his typewriter in just the right way after the drink has taken hold. 

Speaking of writers with a knack for phrasing collectively unconscious profundity, Kurt Vonnegut enjoys zeitgeist status among science fiction fans. Cat's Cradle is his highest rated novel on Goodreads, and it's easy to see why: while Vonnegut expresses his standard wonder at the potential of science with his sardonic views on spirituality, Cat's Cradle endeavors to spin more of a creative story than most of his works. Particularly, the creation of Bokononism and its adherents in addition to the inventive horror of Ice-9 are much more adventurous than some of Vonnegut's fictions, and less reliant on his own life experience. While I enjoy all the Vonnegut I've read, Breakfast of Champions & Slaughterhouse Five both often feel like Vonnegut recounting tall tales from his own life rather than writing a straight up fiction.
My favorite part of this book might actually be the ending. Once the principal technologies of Cat's Cradle's world are understood, it's relatively easy to predict the eventual outcome of the book. However, despite this predictability, as Wikipedia so eloquently summarizes, Bokonon's final reflection that "if he were younger, he would have climbed to the top of Mt. McCabe, placed a book about human stupidity at the peak, and, through the administration of ice-nine, become a statue"  is deeply cynical. Vonnegut has a way of making his utter pessimism seem pleasant and benign, and the ending scene (especially given what Bokonon symbolizes) is a great representation of that.
The issue with creating a religion with all its own words and customs is that it lends itself to rifling off sentences that border on Jabberwocky. At the best of times (see: Dune), the author elaborates and reminds several times, the words feel natural and the prose flows like familiar English. At the worst of times (see: Infinite Jest), the creations and nicknames and tropes blend together to cause moments of confusion. On a sliding scale of Dune-IJ, Cat's Cradle tends towards the more confusing style, and with its relatively few pages, I finished the book just about when I started to recall without effort exactly what a granfalloon or wampeter was. While these ideas added to the story, they created a sludgy reading experience that I never came to appreciate like I did in some other linguistically creative books.
All told, Cat's Cradle is the most conventional, WYSIWYG example of Vonnegut's work that I've had the pleasure of reading, with a narrative capable of standing alone without the aid of symbolism—even though there's plenty to be found. 

Head-to-Head

Characters: Bukowski's women, with occasional exception, may as well be a series of cardboard cutouts. Vonnegut's characters behave almost too much like real and sincerely irrational people for comfort. 

Advantage: Cat's Cradle. 

Plot: Cat's Cradle gets points for inventiveness. Women gets points for telling a half-true story of a fantasy life that, despite its lack of importance or gravity, left me wanting to read more. 

Advantage: Push.

Ending: I'd take a selfie next to that statue. 

Advantage: Cat's Cradle. 

Writing/Language: Both of these writers are renowned for their turns of phrase. Picking a winner between books by each would net several hard decisions. In this case, Cat's Cradle artfully mixes Vonnegut's one-liners with plot devices and storytelling, but Women shines brighter with several of Bukowski's most clever reflections. 

Advantage: Women.

Philosophy: Ask me in ten years when we're in a nuclear winter, or (more importantly) when I'm no longer in my twenties and have accepted that I won't be young forever, and I'll relate more to Cat's Cradle. But, in the here and the now...

Advantage: Women. 

Winner Winner Turkey Supper

Honestly, Cat's Cradle is the higher seed for a reason: it's a more creative book, and it has aged better. But, like in the philosophy section where I flat out admitted that the more shallow message spoke to me; so, too, did the more shallow book. 

Women upsets the higher seed to move to round two.